Leeds Databricks Meet Up

The Leeds Databricks Meet-up returns on Wednesday 10 June 2026 at Banyan Bar & Kitchen, City Square, running from 6pm to 8:30pm BST. This month's theme is AI agents in the real world: not building them (that part is getting easier), but making them reliable, governed, measurable and useful once they're running in production.

Three connected talks cover the full arc. Ash Sultan, Senior Specialist Architect at Databricks, opens with a session on Genie Code — Databricks' autonomous AI tooling for data practitioners, from business users answering questions to engineers building complex ETL pipelines. Luke Thorp, Solutions Architect at Databricks, follows with a talk he's framing through an evolutionary lens: when creating agents is cheap, the question becomes which ones survive contact with production. He looks at reliability, cost, governance and measurable value as the selection pressures that matter. Philip Mifsud of Transatlantix closes with a session on agent observability as a data product — specifically how Databricks Agent Bricks and Lakebase can turn raw agent telemetry (retrieval scores, routing decisions, evaluation outcomes) into a governed, SQL-queryable observability layer with no ETL required.

The event is hosted jointly by Transatlantix and Databricks Leeds Meetup. You do not need to be a Databricks user to attend. The organisers describe the audience as anyone working in data, analytics, AI, cloud platforms, BI or enterprise engineering — which in practice means a mixed room of practitioners rather than a product pitch to existing customers.

Entry is free. Drinks and nibbles are provided throughout. Space is limited, so an RSVP via Meetup is required to secure a place.

Why attend

All three speakers are practitioners from Databricks and Transatlantix, covering a topic — agent observability — that most teams are only just starting to think about seriously. The Lakebase and Agent Bricks session in particular addresses a gap that rarely gets airtime: not how to build agents, but how to know whether they're working and what they're costing you.

Networking runs at the start and end of the evening, with drinks and food provided. City Square is straightforward to reach from Leeds city centre. If you work with data pipelines, AI systems or cloud infrastructure and want a practical evening rather than a vendor keynote, this is a reasonable use of a Wednesday night.

Agenda

• 18:00 – 18:20 | Arrival & networking
• 18:20 – 18:30 | Opening remarks & introductions
• 18:30 – 19:00 | Mastering the Data Engineering Agent for Enterprise ETL with Genie Code — Ash Sultan (Snr. Specialist Architect, Databricks)
• 19:00 – 19:30 | Agentic Darwinism — Luke Thorp (Solutions Architect, Databricks)
• 19:30 – 19:40 | Short break
• 19:40 – 20:10 | Agent Ops as a Data Product: How Agent Bricks and Lakebase Turn Agent Operations into Enterprise Intelligence — Philip Mifsud (Solutions Architect, Transatlantix)
• 20:10 – 20:30 | Networking & close

Speakers

• Ash Sultan — Senior Specialist Architect at Databricks; presenting on Genie Code and AI-assisted data engineering workflows.
• Luke Thorp — Solutions Architect at Databricks; presenting on what makes AI agents survive in production, framed through an evolutionary lens.
• Philip Mifsud — Solutions Architect at Transatlantix; presenting on turning agent telemetry into a governed observability data product using Agent Bricks and Lakebase.