In this episode, Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer @ Monday.com) shares how they are evolving their engineering roles from developers to builders & system designers, where the lines between product, engineering, and design are intentionally blurred, and developers manage AI Agents as team members, tackling an ever-expanding list of projects. We explore the shift from "developer" to "system designer" and why managing AI agents requires the same skills as managing people. Plus, a case study where the Monday.com team leveraged AI agents to decompose a monolith, autonomously manage the project board and assign strategic / high-risk tasks to humans.

Daniel Lereya has served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com since 2023. In this role, he focuses on advancing monday.com’s multi-product vision and operational efficiencies while driving execution to support company growth. Previously, he was Vice President of R&D and Product, leading global teams in shaping and executing the company’s product strategy through innovation and technology. Before joining monday.com, Daniel held leadership and engineering roles at IBM and SAP.

• The three core principles of monday.com’s culture: Ownership, Transparency, and Speed of Execution (3:59)
• How AI acts as an accelerant to implement these cultural principles at scale (8:36)
• Why the “Developer” role is evolving into a “Strategic Builder” and “System Designer” (13:47)
• Breaking silos: How the “Builder” role blurs the lines between product, engineering, and design (17:13)
• Real-world example: A designer using AI to submit code and fix UI issues independently (19:09)
• Case Study: The “Agent Factory” & how a weekend prototype by one leader shifted the product roadmap (21:25)
• Operationalizing transparency: Using internal tools (“Big Brain”) to align every builder on daily business impact (25:58)
• The “Kickoff Meeting” framework: A strict protocol for falling in love with the problem, not the solution (32:26)
• The new management paradigm with AI agents as team members (37:31)
• Rapid fire questions (42:09)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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This is a special episode, highlighting a session from ELC Annual 2025! The true promise of AI isn’t in replicating human intelligence. It’s in developing entirely new forms of non-human intelligence that perceive and understand the world in fundamentally different ways. Jamie Lien (Co-Founder and Chief Scientist @ Archetype AI) and Rashi Agarwal (Head of AI Engineering @ GoodLeap) explore the emergence of "Physical AI" - machines that sense the world through modalities beyond human biology to form internal representations free from our biases. This means building machines that can directly sense the physical world through modalities beyond human biology, form their own internal representations and interpretations free from our biases, and then translate that understanding back to us in human terms.

Jaime Lien, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Archetype AI, a pioneering startup advancing Physical AI, artificial intelligence that understands the real world through real-time sensor data fusion.

With over a dacade of experience in radar-based sensing, signal processing, and hardware engineering, Jaime’s career bridges cutting-edge research and consumer-ready innovation. Before Archetype, she led radar sensing development for Google ATAP’s Project Soli and contributed wireless communication and localization expertise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Rashi Agrawal is Head of AI Engineering at GoodLeap, where she leads enterprise-wide AI initiatives that deliver real business impact. An accomplished speaker, she covers the latest in AI, including context engineering, evaluations, and multi-agent collaboration, while driving Applied AI innovation in the enterprise. Previously, she scaled engineering teams at Yahoo, advancing its multibillion-dollar advertising business. A passionate world traveler to 40+ countries, Rashi brings global perspective and energy to her leadership and storytelling.

• Archetype AI’s mission: Building a foundation model for physical reality (2:24)
• The potential for discovery: Using AI to observe phenomena humans cannot perceive (3:36)
• Augmentation vs. Replacement: Giving humans "superpowers" rather than automating them away (5:48)
• The "Perfect Storm" for Physical AI: Transformers, self-supervised learning, and commodity sensors (6:04)
• Defining “Non-Human Intelligence” and removing the constraints of human labels (8:34)
• Why language is inherently lossy and insufficient for true physical understanding (10:28)
• Real-world application: How Physical AI aids safety decision-making in the solar industry (12:35)
• Use case: Improving pedestrian safety and traffic signaling in Bellevue (14:51)
• The biggest engineering leadership challenge: Embracing the “messiness” of real-world data (16:21)
• Q&A: Why we shouldn't teach AI physical laws, but let it discover them (18:50)
• Q&A: Validating models when there is a defined ground truth vs. subjective language (20:49)
• Q&A: Compute requirements and the future of active learning at the edge (22:05)

• Video version of Jaime and Rashi’s session at ELC Annual 2025

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ruslan Belkin (Head of Platform Engineering @ Inflection AI) joins us to deconstruct fundamental shifts in engineering leadership. We explore the future of user interfaces, his “sci-fi” approach to establish & test product vision, & how to leverage “investor decks” for better decision-making and project validation. Ruslan also dives into the complexities of building emotional intelligence into AI systems, cultivating an outcome-oriented engineering culture & avoiding process traps. Plus, we discuss how to keep up with the velocity of change (including when new research necessitates a major pivot), synthetic data & the future of data as a defensibility strategy, & why agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead.

Ruslan Belkin joined Inflection after co-founding Jelled.ai—acquired by Inflection in 2024—and previously served as CTO of Nauto. Earlier in his career, Ruslan held senior engineering roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, Netscape, and other pioneering Silicon-Valley companies, bringing more than two decades of experience at the intersection of data platforms and machine learning.

• How leading engineering teams is evolving: Moving from code as the source of truth to specs/documentation as the source of truth (2:44)
• Why an eng org’s good hygiene / health will create better output (5:12)
• A framework for product vision: Envisioning the future "viscerally" like a sci-fi novel, stress-testing assumptions, and focusing smart people on the problem (9:04)
• Hiring in the modern era: Why software engineering is becoming "tooling and data engineering" and the importance of hiring for openness to new research (18:20)
• Gen Z vs. Millennial engineers: Ruslan’s observation that Gen Z is more outcome-oriented and has a lower tolerance for "corporate euphemisms." (22:24)
• Ruslan’s favorite frameworks for effective decision making: Using an "investment deck" to validate projects, avoid disbelief and lack of focus. (25:19)
• Keeping up with the velocity of change: How to curate research inputs and determine when a new paper (like DeepSeek) requires a strategic pivot. (32:57)
• The new burden of leadership: Why the velocity of AI requires leaders to be "right more often" and how to use models to increase research rigor. (36:27)
• The "Data Wall" and Synthetic Data: Why we have hit the wall for text data and how synthetic data generation loops will drive the next wave of defensibility. (41:35)
• The "March of 9s": Analyzing the trajectory of the AI market and why increasing agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead. (46:25)
• Rapid fire questions (48:18)

• Ruslan’s Talk at ELC Annual 2025
• The War of Art - Steven Pressfield’s guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.
• A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains - Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.