James Charlesworth
Director of Engineering @ Pendo
London, United Kingdom
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James Charlesworth leads AI-focused engineering teams building agentic systems powered by LLMs at scale. With over 20 years of experience in software engineering, he combines deep technical expertise with a product-first mindset, designing systems that automate workflows, generate AI insights, and integrate tightly with modern SaaS platforms.
He's passionate about bridging the gap between code and customer, helping developers become more product-minded and product teams become more technical. His YouTube channel @traintocode shares hands-on coding tutorials, architecture walkthroughs, and career advice. He also authored books including Developing on AWS with C# for O’Reilly and speaks at conferences and meetups worldwide.
James runs Sheffield.AI, a growing community and quarterly event focused on real-world applications of AI. Whether he's on stage, behind the camera, or in the codebase, James brings practical insight, clear thinking, and a belief that developers should be at the heart of every great product.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Next UI Is a Conversation, Designing Agent-First Interfaces
What if the future of UX isn’t clicks and forms but goals and delegation? As AI agents mature, we need to stop bolting them onto old UIs and start designing experiences for them. In this session, I’ll show how to build an agent-first UX inside a SaaS platform, where the AI doesn’t just answer questions, it owns tasks. You’ll learn about intent resolution, action planning, failure recovery, and why the best agent interfaces feel more like managing a person than using a product.
Going Serverless with C# on AWS
.NET is a primarily backend technology, but being backend does not mean only running on web servers. With over 200 services, AWS has a multitude of ways you can build, manage and monitor entirely serverless back end applications, and best of all, you can do it in .NET.
In this session we are going to cover AWS Lambda, Step Functions and API Gateway in .NET. I'll also show you the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and show you how serverless development in .NET can feel just as “out the box” as anything involving servers or containers. You will need an AWS account and have downloaded credentials (access key/secret) to join in with this workshop.
Bridging the gap between Product and Engineering
In many tech organisations, the wall between product and engineering is still very real. Product Managers define the “what” and Engineers deliver the “how” – but this separation stifles innovation, delays delivery, and leads to mismatched expectations. In this talk, James Charlesworth shares lessons from leading cross-functional teams at scale, and shows how to foster true collaboration between product and engineering. You’ll learn how to develop product sense as an engineer, encourage technical fluency as a product manager, and create a shared sense of ownership that drives better decisions, faster execution, and stronger outcomes. Whether you’re in product, design, or engineering, this talk will give you a practical roadmap for building teams that work together, not just alongside each other.
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