Meet the QCon AI New York 2025 Committee Members
QCon AI New York 2025 Committee Member
Adi Polak
(She / her / hers)
Director, Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering @Confluent, Author of "Scaling Machine Learning with Spark" and "High Performance Spark 2nd Edition"
Adi is an experienced Software Engineer and people manager. She has worked with data and machine learning for operations and analytics for over a decade. As a data practitioner, she developed algorithms to solve real-world problems using machine learning techniques while leveraging expertise in distributed large-scale systems to build machine learning and data streaming pipelines. As a manager, Adi builds high-performance teams focused on trust, excellence, and ownership.
Adi has taught thousands of students how to scale machine learning systems and is the author of the successful book Scaling Machine Learning with Spark and High Performance Spark 2nd Edition.
qcon@192-168-1-1: ~/pc-chair
Session
Beyond Prompting: Context Engineering and Memory Management for AI Systems at Scale
As AI agents evolve from stateless prompt-response tools into stateful, long-running systems, context - not just compute - becomes the true bottleneck. Yet most architectures today treat context retrieval as an afterthought, bolting vector stores onto LLMs and hoping for the best.