Agentic Build Day New Zealand 2026

Official hashtag: #agenticEngineeringDay

About Agentic Build Day New Zealand 2026

Agentic Build Day New Zealand runs for three days, Tuesday, October 20 to Thursday, October 22, 2026, at the Aotea Centre, 50 Mayoral Drive, Auckland. mate.dev organizes the in-person event around building AI agents, with topics such as context engineering, MCP servers, evals, multi-agent orchestration, observability, sandboxing, guardrails and coding agents.

The site lists 25 speakers and 25 sessions. Sessions include a hands-on workshop on SRE agents for incident response, a talk on sandboxing AI agents, and a half-day session on instrumenting an MCP server for audit, signing and policy enforcement. Speakers include Randy Shoup, SVP Engineering at CircleCI, Mic Neale, Principal Engineer at Block, and Mal Curtis, Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA. A call for papers is listed.

Location

50 Mayoral Drive, Auckland, New Zealand

Venue: Aotea Centre

Agenda

Tuesday, October 20

• AI-Powered Incident Response: A Hands-On Workshop with SRE Agents — Ricky Gummadi
• Agentic App Development With Aspire — Sinan Nar
• From Concept to Control Plane: A Hands-On Guide to Microsoft Foundry Agent Service — Jerome Brown
• Why Agentic Workflows — Jason Li

Wednesday, October 21

• Durability Meets Autonomy: Sandboxing AI Agents — Tao Guo
• Instrument your MCP server: audit, signing, and policy enforcement in half a day — Otto Jongerius

Thursday, October 22

• 08:50–09:00 · Welcoming Address — Chris M
• 09:00–09:30 · The Accidental Rise of the Supervisory Engineer — Annie Vella
• 09:30–10:00 · AI Won't Eat Your Stack: Why Robust Components Matter More Than Ever — Randy Shoup
• 10:00–10:30 · What If You Never Needed an API Key Again? Building a Mesh LLM From Spare Compute — Mic Neale
• 10:30–10:45 · Morning tea
• 10:45–11:15 · You're the Principal Engineer of an Agent Squad. Not a Manager. — David Curlewis
• 11:15–11:45 · Opening the Black Box: Tracking, Troubleshooting, and Auditing AI Agents in Production — Jerome Brown
• 11:45–12:15 · Securing the AI-DLC: Travel Edition — Everett Toews & Pauline Kelly
• 12:15–12:45 · Build your own AI Software Factory — Igor Costa
• 12:45–13:35 · Lunch Plenary
• 13:35–14:05 · Eval Driven Development — Jyothi Madanlal
• 14:05–14:35 · Why LLMs Fall for Stories (And 5 Production Patterns That Actually Stop Them) — Mal Curtis
• 14:35–14:55 · Software Factories: From Success to Scale — Josh Wulf
• 14:55–15:05 · Building MCP Servers: Is Another Stack Really Necessary? — Sagara Gunathunga
• 15:05–15:20 · Afternoon tea
• 15:20–15:45 · Your Agent Isn't Broken. The Internet Is. — BMK Lakshminarayanan
• 15:45–16:10 · Intent Is Not Policy: The Two-Layer Contract for Production Agents — Darshit Pandya
• 16:10–16:35 · We built a conversational AI. Our customers built a report generator. — David Sickmiller
• 16:35–17:00 · Lightweight Architecture Governance in the Age of AI — Amir Mohtasebi & Brian Wang

Speakers

• Annie Vella
  Engineering Leader and Researcher
• Randy Shoup
  SVP Engineering, CircleCI
• Mic Neale
  Principal Engineer, Block
• Jerome Brown
  Principal Consultant, Mantel
• Pauline Kelly
  Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
• Everett Toews
  Specialist Director, Deloitte
• Mal Curtis
  Principal Software Engineer, NVIDIA
• David Curlewis
  Senior Engineering Manager, Canva
• Jyothi Madanlal
  Solutions Architect, AWS
• David Sickmiller
  Principal Product Engineer, AskNicely
• Sagara Gunathunga
  Head of DevRel, IAM, WSO2
• Igor Costa
  Autohand AI
• Darshit Pandya
  Senior Principal Engineer, Platform, Serko
• Josh Wulf
  Technical Lead, Production Line Engineering, Camunda
• BMK Lakshminarayanan
  Transformation Architect, SECTION6
• Amir Mohtasebi
  Head of Engineering Architecture, Trade Me
• Brian Wang
  Enterprise Architect, Trade Me
• Chris M
• Otto Jongerius
  Senior Backend Engineer, Tempo by Forsyth Barr
• Tao Guo
  Senior Staff Solutions Architect, Temporal
• Jason Li
  Consultant, Arinco
• Sinan Nar
  Apps & AI Consultant, Arinco
• Ricky Gummadi
  Senior Solution Architect, Microsoft
• Igor Jovovic
  Senior Solution Architect, Microsoft

Sponsors

• SECTION6
• Plexure
• AutoHand

Agentic Build Day New Zealand 2026 FAQ