From Squads to Soloists: RIP the Engineering Team

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!