Tiger Teams, Evals and Agents: The New AI Engineering Playbook

About this episode

Shane Hastie interviews Sam Bhagwat about AI engineering, open source communities, and the role of Tiger Teams in developing applications.

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Sam Bhagwat, co-founder and CEO of Mastra, about building and sustaining open source communities, the emerging discipline of AI engineering and evals, and how cross-functional Tiger Teams are key to shipping agentic applications. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4ccSI6m Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter Upcoming Events: QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026) Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI. https://boston.qcon.ai QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20, 2026) https://qconsf.com/ The InfoQ Podcasts: Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts: - The InfoQ Podcast https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/ - Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ…

People in this episode

Host: Shane Hastie

Guest: Sam Bhagwat

Topics covered

• AI engineering
• open source communities
• Tiger Teams
• agentic applications

Keywords

• engineering culture
• cross-functional teams
• software development

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Mastra

Books & works: the Engineering Culture Podcast

Places: San Francisco

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