Meetup
Data engineering meetup
Join us for an engaging meetup: This time focussing on Deterministic Context Layers for AI Agents and Career Switching in the AI Era.
April 23rd | Berlin
Date
April 23rd, 2026
18:30 – 21:30
Location
Spiced Academy Office
Ritterstraße 12-14
10969 Berlin
Drinks & Food
A few drinks and some
snacks are available
free of charge.
Dear data-loving community,
Dear data-loving community, we’re excited to invite you to our next Meetup!
This time in collaboration with Spiced Academy, who will be hosting us at their space.
Join us on April 23 in Berlin and bring all your questions! 🙂
Tom Kaltofen
Creator @ mloda.ai | Engineer @ DHL Data & AI
Building Deterministic Context Layers for AI Agents
Data access and reuse are still unsolved, and AI agents are making it worse. This talk goes deeper into that problem: AI agents depend on reliable context (data, features, intermediate state) to make correct decisions. In practice, this context is tied to specific pipelines or infrastructure, leading to brittle systems when moving from prototype to production.
He’ll show how a plugin-based approach lets teams build deterministic context layers: separating what you compute from how you compute it, so the same feature definitions work on a laptop and in production.
The talk includes a live demo where an AI agent discovers and queries data features programmatically.
What If I Started Today? Rethinking Career Switching in the AI Era
Behnaz Derakhshani works as a Data Engineer at Diconium. She shares her personal career shift from finance to data engineering, including the unfiltered challenges and lessons along the way.
About her keynote:
“Eight years ago, there was no AI to debug my logic, just documentation and Stack Overflow. Now as a Data Engineer, I’m breaking down the lessons learned from my finance to tech transition and why AI makes this the most exciting (and accessible) time to pivot.”
Behnaz Derakhshani
Data Engineer | Diconium
Agenda
Event admission
Welcome & Introduction
Building Deterministic Context Layers for AI Agents
Tom Kaltofen
5 minutes break
What If I Started Today? Rethinking Career Switching in the AI Era
Behnaz Derakhshani
Snacks, Drinks & Networking
End
You want to give a talk at our meetup?
We are open to external speakers. So, if you’re interested in giving a short talk on a Data Engineering topic or have additional input on possible topics, feel free to reach out and leave us a message here:
What to expect:
Expert talks
Gain knowledge from industry leaders and experts who will share their experiences, strategies, and best practices in data engineering.
meetup
Interactive Q&A
Have your pressing questions answered by the experts during dedicated Q&A sessions. Engage with a diverse group of professionals from various sectors as they discuss the benefits, challenges, and future outlook of data engineering.
meetup
Networking opportunities
Connect with like-minded professionals and expand your network in the field of data engineering.
meetup
Hosts
Peer Schwirtz
Director data architecture & data engineering
Prateek Narula
Director cloud engineering
Jens Wriske
Senior cloud architect
Get your free ticket now
Please join our meetup group to attend the event.
At the event, sound, image and video recordings are created and published for documentation purposes as well as for the presentation of the event in publicly accessible media, on websites and blogs and for presentation on social media. By participating the event, the participant implicitly consents to the aforementioned photo and/or video recordings. Find more information on data protection here.
Recap: Data engineering meetup February 2026
Amazing! Our first Meetup in 2026 happened on February 26th Berlin. Pawel Wiszniewski (Flink SE) talked about: From Ingestion to Insight: Flink’s Data Platform Ecosystem. And Sneha Nafade (Diconium) presented AI Agents & Agentic Deployment. We’ve had a great time with these two insightful keynotes and the following discussions. See you next time!
Recap: Data engineering meetup December 2025
What do data neurons, tequila, data gurus, and shining stars have in common?
They were all team names in our Meetup pub quiz, each trying to win the prize for the cleverest data minds! In our data engineering quiz, they competed with plenty of geeky joy and after-work ambition.
Which system is commonly used to orchestrate workflows?
Which service counts as a cloud data warehouse?
And which cloud provider is the fastest?
The questions pushed everyone’s knowledge, sparked some discussions and laughter, and eventually the winning team was set. With no last place and just two points ahead of the two teams tied for third, the sparkling drink and the applydata socks went to…shining stars!
We had a great time thanks to our energetic data community and to our speaker of the evening, Kaan Ara. If you missed this Meetup, no worries: more is coming in 2026!
Recap: Data engineering meetup October 2025
Both talks packed with refreshingly real takes and honest opinions. No glossy business talk, just the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff we secretly crave: tricky bottlenecks, how to actually fixed them, and also what‘s not fixed yet.
Thanks to everybody, especially Tom for talking about “What Data Scientists Actually Need from Data Engineers: A ‘Data Producer’ Perspective” and Alex for talking about an “Event-driven data streaming platform at VW Group”
Recap: data engineering meetup September 2025
You may leave the room with more knowledge than before – this could have been the alternative title of today‘s Meetup, because these three talks were packed! Thanks to all attendees who showed a lot of energy today, asked so many questions, continued asking during pizza, and leaving us as the applydata team with a happy smile on our face.
Topics
Achieving Sub-100-ms Real-Time Stream Processing with an S3-Native Architecture – with Yingjun Wu
From Raw Data to Trusted Assets: A Practical Walkthrough with AWS services and Collibra – with Behnaz Derakhshani
Effective Agentic GenAI in Data Streaming – with Erik Schmiegelow
Recap: data engineering meetup July 2025
Our latest Data Engineering Meetup took place on July 22nd in Berlin. Despite the not very summery weather, a diverse and large group of data-loving people came together to enjoy Aleksandr Kudriavtcev’s talk featuring cute cats, candid opinions, and plenty of technical depth.
And the event didn’t end with the talk: for the first time, we also included an interactive part using Mentimeter, which sparked a wide range of insights and showcased the diversity of our data community. Conversations continued well into the evening, accompanied by food from the grillmaster, until it got dark outside.
We can’t wait to host the next one – stay tuned!
Recap: data engineering meetup May 2025
Lessons from the Cloud: Building a Scalable, Decentralized Data Platform with Snowflake, dbt & S3
Business Intelligence in practice: Dagster & DBT
Recap: data engineering meetup March 2025
On March 13th 2025, we have been focussing on scaling analytics with dbt and simplifying Kubernetes job execution. Thanks to everyone who attended our event last Thursday as part of the audience and by connecting with us and like-minded people over a drink or a pretzel. We were impressed by the specific questions that came up during and after the talks!
Topics
Scaling Analytics with dbt: From Implementation to Impact – with Ceren Gündoğdu
Kube API: Simplifying Kubernetes Job Execution – with Ajit Gosavi
Recap: data engineering meetup December 2024
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our latest data engineering meetup! It was an incredible evening filled with insightful discussions, innovative ideas, and valuable networking.
A huge shoutout to our speakers, whose expertise and engaging presentation truly enlightened us on their real life use cases in the world of data engineering. We are so grateful for your contribution and the knowledge you shared with our community. We also want to extend our thanks to all the attendees who brought their energy, questions, and enthusiasm to the event. Your active participation is what makes our meetups so special.
Rewatch the presentations here:
Behnaz Derakhshani
The Day It All Went Down: A True Story of Challenges and Lessons from our Snowplow Pipeline Outage
Aditya Kadiwal, Reza Yazdani
Inside a real-world databricks Project: Setup, implementation, customer wins, and lessons learned
Host
This meetup is hosted by diconium.
Please follow the applydata LinkedIn page.
