Friday Hacks #304, October 30: Trust Is the Product and Software Engineering in 2026
Posted on by ZhengHao
Date/Time: Friday, October 30 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm SGT
Venue: Seminar Room 12, COM3-01-21, NUS
Sign-up: Luma
Food 🍕 and Drinks 🧋 will be served!
1) Trust Is the Product: Deploying AI Agents to Highly Regulated Enterprises
Sierra builds the AI agents behind customer service at over 40% of the Fortune 500. Regulated companies are the hardest to win: one wrong answer can mean a fine. Learn the engineering that wins them over, including evaluations with simulated customers, LLM guardrails, observability, and A/B testing for agents.
Company & Speaker Profile 🎙️
Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world’s biggest brands to transform how they serve customers.
Shaun Livingston is an Agent Engineer at Sierra and part of the founding team at Sierra in Singapore, building AI agents that banks and insurers trust in front of millions of customers. He has over a decade of experience as a Software Engineer and knows how to ship fast without breaking things.
2) What Is Software Engineering in 2026?
What does it mean to be a software engineer in the age of coding agents and LLMs? Drawing on work with the team behind the open-source MLflow and Omnigent projects, this talk explores how software engineering is changing and why hacker culture and good software engineering practices go hand in hand.
Speaker Profile 🎙️
Kris Concepcion is a Software Engineer at Databricks working on the team that manages the open-source MLflow and Omnigent projects. He has 27 years of experience working for U.S. government contractors, a startup, and big tech.
👋 See you there!