#34 Meetup  |  January 22, 2026

From Squads to Soloists: RIP the Engineering Team

A woman speaker at a podium closing her talk with a 'Thank you' slide, applauded by a seated audience at an ELC meetup, a world map wall art visible behind them

“From Squads to Soloists” is ELC Meetup #34, held at Make in Prague on 22 January 2026.

The Engineering Leaders Community meets every month. Join ELC to get the next invite, or pitch a talk for a future night.

From 8-person squads to micro-teams of one.

Meet your new team: Sam (Coding), Jen (Review), and Pat (Stories). They are AI agents. They don’t need lunch breaks.

In 2026, the engineer is a “Soloist” who ships the whole thing. But what happens to the leadership structures we’ve spent decades building?

We are putting the new org chart on the table:

🤖 The Agent Economy: If your team is mostly non-human, what is left for the Engineering Manager to manage?

👥 The Soloist Reality: Is the “100x Engineer” feasible in enterprise, or just a startup fantasy?

💻 The Missing Rungs: If AI writes the boilerplate, how do we train the next generation of Staff Engineers?

Our speakers:

🧠 Yoav Shmaria - VP R&D, SaaS Platform @ Similarweb

🧠 Sara Maldon - Head of AI Automation & Transformation @ Make

🧠 Petr Kubelka - Engineering Manager @ Mews

10-minute lightning talks followed by a panel discussion and legendary networking!

Watch Recording

For you

Want more than one evening on AI-native teams?

A 2-day flagship that rebuilds the engineering manager job around AI: review policy, spend, pipeline and reporting.

See the course

For companies

Want a night like this at your office?

Your venue, your speaker, ELC runs the rest: 120+ engineering leaders registered and €3,000 when you host.

See how hosting works

This one is over. Here is the next one.