Friday Hacks #304: Trust is the Product: Deploying AI agents to highly regulated enterprises & What is Software Engineering in 2026?
Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, we have:
Talk 1: Trust is the Product: Deploying AI agents to highly regulated enterprises
Sierra builds the AI agents behind customer service at Vanguard, SoFi, Cigna, and over 40% of the Fortune 50. Regulated companies are the hardest to win: one wrong answer can mean a fine. Learn the engineering that wins them: evals with simulated customers, LLM guardrails, observability, and A/B testing for agents. Production AI skills, straight from the source.
Company Intro:
Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We help businesses build better, more human experiences with AI. We were founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor (Chairman of the OpenAI Board, ex CTO of Meta), and Clay Bavor (led Google AR/VR laps, Google docs, co-creator of Google Maps).
Headquartered in San Francisco, we now have a global footprint and are expanding internationally across APAC and EMEA. Our team works at the forefront of AI, combining research with a focus on real-world impact. That blend of innovation and practicality drives everything we do, and we’re always on the lookout for thoughtful, mission-driven people.
Speaker Profile:
Shaun Livingston is an Agent Engineer at Sierra, the leading platform helping businesses build better customer experiences with AI. Shaun was an early member of Sierra and part of the founding team at Sierra in Singapore. Shaun now builds AI agents that banks and insurers trust in front of millions of customers. Shaun has over a decade of experience as a Software Engineer and knows how to ship fast without breaking things.
Talk 2: What is Software Engineering in 2026?
What does it mean to be a software engineer in the age of coding agents and LLMs? Drawing on my current work with the team behind the open-source MLflow and Omnigent projects, I’ll explore how software engineering is changing and why hacking culture and good software engineering practices go hand in hand.
Speaker Profile:
Kris Concepcion is a software engineer at Databricks working on the team that manages the OSS MLflow and Omnigent projects. He has 27 years of experience working for U.S. government contractors, a startup, and big tech.
📍 COM3 SR12
🍕🧋will be served!