Leeds Databricks Meet Up

The Leeds Databricks Meet-up returns on Wednesday 10 June 2026, running 6:00–8:30 PM at Banyan Bar & Kitchen on City Square. This edition'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 actually running.

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 aimed at data practitioners, from business users querying data through to engineers building complex pipelines. Luke Thorp, Solutions Architect at Databricks, follows with 'Agentic Darwinism': an argument that when creating agents is cheap, survival in production comes down to reliability, cost, governance and measurable value. The final talk comes from Philip Mifsud of Transatlantix, who covers Agent Ops as a data product — specifically how Databricks Agent Bricks and Lakebase can turn the operational signals that agents emit (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. You do not need to be a Databricks user to attend. The organisers describe the audience as anyone working across data, analytics, AI, cloud platforms, BI or enterprise engineering — which in practice means a mixed room of engineers, architects and data professionals.

Networking runs at the start and end of the evening. Drinks and nibbles are included throughout. The event is free but space is limited, so an RSVP via Meetup is required.

Why attend

All three speakers are practitioners from Databricks and Transatlantix, talking about problems they work on directly: agent reliability in production, observability without ETL overhead, and autonomous data engineering tooling. The agenda is specific enough to be useful rather than introductory.

The format — two hours, three 30-minute talks, drinks included — is a reasonable use of a Wednesday evening. City Square is a five-minute walk from Leeds station. If you work with data pipelines, AI systems or cloud infrastructure and want to hear how other teams are approaching agent observability, this is a practical evening out.

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 autonomous AI tooling for 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 operational telemetry into a governed observability data product using Agent Bricks and Lakebase.