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Google SRE NYC proudly announces our last Google SRE NYC Tech Talk for 2025.

This event is co-sponsored by sentry.io. Thank you Sentry for your partnership!

Let's farewell 2025 with three amazing interactive short talks on Site Reliability and DevOps topics! As always the event will include an opportunity to mingle with the speakers and attendees over some light snacks and beverages after the talks.

The Meetup will take place on Tuesday, 16th of December 2025 at 6:00 PM at our Chelsea Markets office in NYC. The doors will open at 5:30 pm. Pls RSVP only if you're able to attend in-person, there will be no live streaming.

When RSVP'ing to this event, please enter your full name exactly as it appears on your government issued ID. You will be required to present your ID at check in.

Agenda: Paul Jaffre - Senior Developer Experience Engineer\, sentry.io One Trace to Rule Them All: Unifying Sentry Errors with OpenTelemetry tracing SREs face the challenge of operating reliable observability infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in from proprietary APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solutions. OpenTelemetry has become the standard for instrumenting applications, allowing teams to collect traces, metrics, and logs. But raw telemetry data isn't enough. SREs need tools to visualize, debug, and respond to production incidents quickly. Sentry now supports OTLP, enabling teams to send OpenTelemetry data directly to Sentry for analysis. This talk covers how Sentry's OTLP support works in practice: connecting frontend and backend traces across services, correlating logs with distributed traces, and using tools to identify slow queries and performance bottlenecks. We'll discuss the practical benefits for SREs, like faster incident resolution, better cross-team debugging, and the flexibility to change observability backends without re-instrumenting code. Paul’s background spans engineering, product management, UX design, and open source. He has a soft spot for dev tools and loses sleep over making things easy to understand and use. Paul has a dynamic professional background, from strategy to stability. His time at Krossover Intelligence established a strong foundation by blending Product Management with hands-on development, and he later focused on core reliability at MakerBot, where he implemented automated end-to-end testing and drove performance improvements. He then extended this expertise in stability and scale at Cypress.io, where he served as a Developer Experience Engineer, focusing on improving workflow, contribution, and usability for their widely adopted open-source community.

Thiara Ortiz - Cloud Gaming SRE Manager\, Netflix Managing Black Box Systems SREs often face ambiguity when managing black box systems (LLMs, Games, Poorly Understood Dependencies). We will discuss how Netflix monitors service health as black boxes using multiple measurement techniques to understand system behavior, aligning with the need for robust observability tools. These strategies are crucial for system reliability and user experience. By proactively identifying and resolving issues, we ensure smoother playback experience and maintain user trust, even as the platform continues to evolve and gain maturity. The principles shared within this talk can be expanded to other applications such as AI reliability in data quality and model deployments.

Thiara has worked at some of the largest internet companies in the world, Meta and Netflix. During her time at Meta, Thiara found a passion for distributed systems and bringing new hardware into production. Always curious to explore new solutions to complex problems, Thiara developed Fleet Scanner, internally known as Lemonaid, to perform memory, compute, and storage benchmarks on each Meta server in production. This service runs on over 5 million servers and continues to be utilized at Meta. Since Meta, Thiara has been working at Netflix as a Senior CDN Reliability engineer, and now, Cloud Gaming SRE Manager. When incidents occur and Netflix's systems do not behave as expected, Thiara can be found working and engaging the necessary teams to remediate these issues.

Andrew Espira - Platform and Site Reliability Engineer\, Founding Engineer kustode ML-Powered Predictive SRE: Using Behavioral Signals to Prevent Cluster Inefficiencies Before They Impact Production SREs managing ML clusters often discover resource inefficiencies and queue bottlenecks only after they've impacted production services. This talk presents a machine learning approach to predict these issues before they occur, transforming SRE from reactive firefighting to proactive system optimization. We demonstrate how to build predictive models using production cluster traces that identify two critical failure modes: (1) GPU under-utilization relative to requested resources, and (2) abnormal queue wait times that indicate impending service degradation. The SRE practitioners will learn how to extract early warning indicators from standard cluster logs, build ML models that provide actionable confidence scores for operational decisions, and take practical steps to integrate predictive analytics into existing SRE toolchains to achieve 50%+ reduction in resource waste and queue-related incidents This talk bridges the gap between traditional SRE observability and modern predictive analytics, showing how teams can evolve from reactive monitoring to intelligent, forward-looking reliability engineering" Andrew has over 8 years of experience architecting and maintaining large-scale distributed systems. He is the Founding Engineer of Kustode (kustode.com), where he develops cutting-edge reliability and observability solutions for modern infrastructure in the Insurance and health care solutions space. Currently pursuing graduate studies in Data Science at Saint Peter's University, he specializes in the intersection of reliability engineering and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on applying machine learning to operational challenges, with publications in peer-reviewed venues including ScienceDirect. He's passionate about making complex systems more predictable and maintainable through data-driven approaches. When not optimizing cluster performance or building the next generation of observability tools, Andrew enjoys contributing to open-source projects and mentoring early-career engineers in the SRE community.

Our Tech Talks series are for professional development and networking: no recruiters, sales or press please! Google is committed to providing a harassment-free and inclusive conference experience for everyone, and all participants must follow our Event Community Guidelines. The event will be photographed and video recorded.

Event space is limited! A reservation is required to attend. Reserve your spot today and share the event details with your SRE/DevOps friends 🙂

This will be Transit Techies NYC's final session of the year, and we have some amazing speakers to look forward to. Talks will start at 6:30pm, and we'll mingle over light bites and refreshments before and afterwards.

Please sign up on NYU CUSP's Luma event for building access!

Speakers

Aaron Gordon, Surya Mattu, and Marie Patino are reporters at Bloomberg News.

"NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot"

NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the LIRR are crucial arteries into Manhattan, moving hundreds of thousands of commuters into the Financial District and Midtown every day. As New York City faces a housing affordability crisis, the railroads are critical to the city’s future as the region seeks to build more densely near train stops. But one of those commuter railroads, NJ Transit, is significantly less reliable than the others. To understand the frequency of significant delays on New York commuter lines, Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains this summer using live transit feeds, the kind used by navigation apps such as Google Maps. The results show NJ Transit riders had more issues than their New York and Connecticut counterparts. About one in every 18 NJ Transit trains was delayed by at least 15 minutes or canceled completely in May, June and July. For an average commuter, that meant a bad commute roughly every two weeks, versus once every three months or more on the more reliable lines to New York and Connecticut suburbs.

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Elif Ensari is a Research Scholar at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where she works with the Transportation and Land Use group. Her research focuses on the costs of building passenger rail, ridership estimation, transit-oriented development, and New York City’s walking and cycling infrastructure.

Benjamin Arnav is a Fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where he works with the Transportation and Land Use group. He applies machine learning to study urban governance issues related to transportation, government responsiveness, policing and use of public space. He is also a contract researcher at OpenAI, where he works on model evaluations.

Elif and Benjamin will present “Eye in the Sky: Harnessing AI to Monitor Police Response to Illegal Parking Complaints,” co-authored with Benjamin Arnav. Illegal parking clogs travel lanes, worsens gridlock, and blocks critical infrastructure, yet enforcement remains inconsistent. Using artificial intelligence and New York City DOT’s public camera feeds, the team developed an automated system to file 311 complaints and monitor police responses citywide. Their analysis revealed that over half of complaints were closed while vehicles remained illegally parked, and that only 3% resulted in tickets. These findings expose major enforcement gaps and point to the potential of automated ticketing and smarter street design to address chronic violations.

Please sign up on NYU CUSP's Luma event for building access!

The event will be held at 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY in Room 1201. We hope to see you there!

PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED HERE - https://lu.ma/4z5gjj9a

Calling all AI pioneers and visionaries! Get ready to ignite your passion at an electrifying meetup co-hosted by ODSC, Google Cloud, and ArentFox Schiff, right in the pulsating heart of NYC's AI innovation!

Mark your calendars for an unforgettable evening on Thursday, June 12th, from 6 PM - 8 PM ET. This isn't just another meetup; it's your exclusive gateway to the future of AI.

Prepare to dive deep into the fascinating world of Agentic AI with Michael Scarpati, Ph.D., and the brilliant minds from Google Cloud. This is your chance to not only level up your AI agents game but also to forge invaluable connections within the AI community.

Here's what awaits you:

• ⚡️ Agentic AI Unleashed: Get ready for cutting-edge insights and actionable strategies to master the next frontier of AI.
• ⚡️ Networking Nirvana: Connect with fellow AI rockstars, industry leaders, and potential collaborators. Build a network that will accelerate your career and spark groundbreaking ideas.
• ⚡️ Interactive Brainstorm: Engage in dynamic discussions, ask burning questions, and share your vision in an atmosphere buzzing with innovation.
• ⚡️ Fuel Your Genius: Enjoy delicious snacks and an electric atmosphere designed to spark creativity and collaboration.

Seats are limited, so secure your spot now! Don't miss this epic opportunity to be at the forefront of Agentic AI and expand your professional network.

Event Details: 📅 Date: Thursday, June 12th 📍 Time: 6 PM - 8 PM ET 📍 Location: ArentFox Schiff LLP, 1301 Avenue of the Americas, 42nd Floor, New York, NY 10019 United States

​​​Some useful links: • Get free access to more talks/trainings like this at Ai+ Training platform: https://hubs.li/H0Zycsf0 • ODSC blog: https://opendatascience.com/ • Slack Channel: https://hubs.li/Q038cQBy0 • Code of conduct: https://odsc.com/code-of-conduct/

Move beyond theoretical AI concepts and dive into building practical, production-ready AI agents in this intensive, hands-on workshop. We'll harness the power of Gemini 2.5, utilizing Google's latest open-source framework designed for building sophisticated single and multi-agent systems, Agent Development Kit (ADK).

What You Will Learn:

This workshop covers the full stack of agent development, from data integration to final deployment and runtime.

Develop with ADK: Learn to build modular, controllable agents using the ADK framework.

Enable Agent Collaboration: Implement sophisticated multi-agent workflows using the open Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol..

Deploy & Orchestrate: Transition your agents from development to production using flexible deployment strategies. We'll cover deploying and managing agents using Vertex AI Agent Engine, and Google Cloud Run. Learn to scale, manage, and ensure the reliability of your agent systems in the cloud.

Production Focus: Understand the complete lifecycle, including packaging agents, deploying them reliably on Google Cloud.

Introduce Observability: Briefly cover essential concepts for monitoring your production agents

By the end of this workshop, you'll have practical experience building and orchestrating multi-agent systems using Google's cutting-edge AI technologies, preparing you to implement real-world, production-grade AI solutions.

We are glad to partner with Google GDG to organize Google DevFest NYC at and awesome space at Pier 57.

As part of the programming there will be talks dedicated to Web Performance and Core Web Vitals.

Please RSVP on DevFest event page: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-nyc-presents-devfest-nyc-2024-responsible-ai-for-the-future-of-tech/

---- Join us for DevFest NYC 2024 at Google, the tech event of the year where innovation meets responsibility! This year, we're diving deep into the world of Responsible AI, exploring how we can build a future where technology empowers and benefits everyone.

• Learn from the best: Hear from Google experts across various teams, including Google Cloud, Chrome, and Maps.
• Connect with fellow developers: Participate in Q&A sessions, product demo/overviews or a group product feedback session.

Important: You're invited to an exclusive event at Google's coolest space! Please only RSVP if you are absolutely certain you can attend. We want to make sure everyone who wants to come has the opportunity.

Detailed Agenda and Speakers coming soon!

9:00 am - 10:15 am Doors Open and Registration 10:15 am - 10:30 am Welcome and Intro 10:30 am - 1:00 Keynote, talks, workshops, demos 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Closing keynote, talks, workshops, demos 5:00 pm Close

Memory, the foundation of human intelligence, is still one of the most complex and mysterious aspects of the brain. Despite decades of research, we've only scratched the surface of understanding how our memories are formed, stored, and retrieved. But what if AI could help us crack the code on memory? How might AI be the key to unlocking problems that have evaded human cognition for so long? Kim Stachenfeld is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in NYC and Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University.  Her research covers topics in Neuroscience and AI. On the Neuroscience side, she study how animals build and use models of their world that support memory and prediction. On the Machine Learning side, she works on implementing these cognitive functions in deep learning models. Kim’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, Nautilus, and MIT Technology Review. In 2019, she was named one of MIT Tech Review’s Innovators under 35 for her work on predictive representations in hippocampus.  In the episode, Richie and Kim explore her work on Google Gemini, the importance of customizability in AI models, the need for flexibility and adaptability in AI models, retrieval databases and how they improve AI response accuracy, AI-driven science, the importance of augmenting human capabilities with AI and the challenges associated with this goal, the intersection of AI, neuroscience and memory and much more.  Links Mentioned in the Show: DeepMindAlphaFoldDr James Whittington - A unifying framework for frontal and temporal representation of memoryPaper - Language models show human-like content effects onreasoning tasksKim’s Website[Course] Artificial Intelligence (AI) StrategyRelated Episode: Making Better Decisions using Data & AI with Cassie Kozyrkov, Google's First Chief Decision ScientistSign up to RADAR: AI Edition New to DataCamp? Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile appEmpower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business

Summary Managing a data warehouse can be challenging, especially when trying to maintain a common set of patterns. Dataform is a platform that helps you apply engineering principles to your data transformations and table definitions, including unit testing SQL scripts, defining repeatable pipelines, and adding metadata to your warehouse to improve your team’s communication. In this episode CTO and co-founder of Dataform Lewis Hemens joins the show to explain his motivation for creating the platform and company, how it works under the covers, and how you can start using it today to get your data warehouse under control.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With 200Gbit private networking, scalable shared block storage, and a 40Gbit public network, you’ve got everything you need to run a fast, reliable, and bullet-proof data platform. If you need global distribution, they’ve got that covered too with world-wide datacenters including new ones in Toronto and Mumbai. And for your machine learning workloads, they just announced dedicated CPU instances. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! This week’s episode is also sponsored by Datacoral. They provide an AWS-native, serverless, data infrastructure that installs in your VPC. Datacoral helps data engineers build and manage the flow of data pipelines without having to manage any infrastructure. Datacoral’s customers report that their data engineers are able to spend 80% of their work time invested in data transformations, rather than pipeline maintenance. Raghu Murthy, founder and CEO of Datacoral built data infrastructures at Yahoo! and Facebook, scaling from mere terabytes to petabytes of analytic data. He started Datacoral with the goal to make SQL the universal data programming language. Visit Datacoral.com today to find out more. Are you working on data, analytics, or AI using platforms such as Presto, Spark, or Tensorflow? Check out the Data Orchestration Summit on November 7 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This one day conference is focused on the key data engineering challenges and solutions around building analytics and AI platforms. Attendees will hear from companies including Walmart, Netflix, Google, and DBS Bank on how they leveraged technologies such as Alluxio, Presto, Spark, Tensorflow, and you will also hear from creators of open source projects including Alluxio, Presto, Airflow, Iceberg, and more! Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off of your ticket, and the first five people to register get free tickets! Register now as early bird tickets are ending this week! Attendees will takeaway learnings, swag, a free voucher to visit the museum, and a chance to win the latest ipad Pro! You listen to this show to learn and stay up to date with what’s happening in databases, streaming platforms, big data, and everything else you need to know about modern data management. For even more opportunities to meet, listen, and learn from your peers you don’t want to miss out on this year’s conference season. We have partnered with organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Dataversity, Corinium Global Intelligence, Alluxio, and Data Council. Upcoming events include the combined events of the Data Architecture Summit and Graphorum, the Data Orchestration Summit, and Data Council in NYC. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/conferences to learn more about these and other events, and take advantage of our partner discounts to save money when you register today. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Lewis Hemens about DataForm, a platform that helps analy