The Rise of the AI Platform Engineer
Techstrong TV Interviews
•
15m
Site reliability engineering just got a new job description. Harish Gaggar, Staff Software Site Reliability Engineer at Credit Karma, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to explain how traditional platform engineering is being reshaped by the demands of AI agents, agentic workflows and the strict compliance rules of a regulated fintech. Over 10 years at Credit Karma, Harish has watched the discipline evolve from provisioning GKE clusters to building a paved-path platform where any developer can go from idea to a fully functional AI agent in a single day. He walks through his “build, deploy, operate” methodology — automating GitHub repo creation and boilerplate through internal developer portals, standardizing workload identity and guardrails at deploy time, and wiring in centralized memory, tracing and observability from day one. He also gets candid about the realities of building AI in an air-gapped, regulated environment where SaaS shortcuts aren’t an option, and closes with practical advice for SREs facing the shift.
Up Next in Techstrong TV Interviews
-
The Perception Layer for AI Agents
Documents sit behind almost every business process, and most enterprises are about to learn the hard way that AI agents cannot reason about what they cannot read. Slavena Hristova, Director of Product Marketing for Document AI at ABBYY, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to explain how 35+ years ...
-
Flow Is Necessary, But Not Sufficient
Work has to move — but it also has to matter. Phil Clark, the former VP Engineering at Parchment (acquired by Instructure for $835M in 2024) and founder of RYU Advisory & Media, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to preview his Flowtopia 2026 talk: "Flow is necessary but not sufficient. Why leade...
-
Open Source Is the Inevitable End Sta...
Open source is no longer just a software movement — it is the foundation the entire AI stack is built on, from CUDA to Kubernetes to the models themselves. Duane O'Brien, the new Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to talk about the organizat...
