Reframing your team for AI: what actually changes when it's already part of the job
Most conversation about AI and engineering teams treats it as a hiring problem, not enough people with the right skills. This session starts from a different, more common situation: you already have a team, and the job itself has changed underneath them. The question isn't who to hire, it's what to reframe, what to leave alone, and what that shift actually asks of the people going through it.
This first session is hosted in collaboration with Bloq.it, a Lisbon-based company building smart locker infrastructure for last-mile delivery, whose engineering team has been navigating exactly this kind of reframing firsthand.
Speakers:
Alex Ponomarev, Founder & CEO of Volt, with 20+ years building and scaling global technology companies. He leads teams building AI-native intelligence layers for venture capital firms. His focus is bridging human expertise with AI to improve decision-making and performance.Through his publication Thriving in Engineering, he shares practical frameworks that help engineering leaders navigate complexity and build high-performing teams.
Carol Palombini, Leadership & Culture Consultant specializing in the human side of AI adoption. A psychologist, former Head of HR, and executive coach with extensive experience working with technology leaders, she helps organizations assess whether their leaders, people, and culture are ready for AI-driven change.
Her work brings leadership readiness, psychological safety, workforce attitudes, and burnout risk into AI adoption strategy, helping organizations create the conditions for AI to move from experimentation to sustainable adoption.
Diamantino Almeida is a Senior Engineering Manager and Platform Engineering leader based in Lisbon, with over two decades of experience in infrastructure, cloud, and engineering leadership across Portugal and the UK.
He specialises in building reliable, cost-efficient cloud platforms on AWS and Azure, leading digital transformations, and scaling engineering organisations, with expertise in SRE, security, FinOps, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and Terraform. Most recently, he has worked as a Strategic Advisor and Fractional Engineering Leader, focusing on LLM evaluation strategy and AI systems.
Diamantino also mentors engineers and leaders and writes Leadership as a Verb, a newsletter about technology, engineering culture, and leadership.
This is for you if you're: an engineering manager, tech lead, or CTO with an existing team, figuring out how to change what that team does. Also useful if you're an individual engineer trying to work out what to actually get better at.
First in a new monthly series from Thriving in Engineering.