Building an AI prototype has never been easier. Building an AI platform that is secure, scalable, observable, and reliable enough for production is an entirely different challenge.

In this talk, I'll share the engineering journey behind Synkora, an open-source AI platform designed to help organisations build and operate production-grade AI applications without being locked into a specific model provider or cloud vendor.

Rather than focusing on prompts or individual LLMs, this session explores the engineering foundations required to run AI systems in production. We'll cover how we designed a modular architecture that supports multiple AI providers, agent workflows, contextual retrieval, workflow orchestration, background processing, and self-hosted deployments.

More importantly, I'll discuss the real engineering challenges we encountered along the way—from scaling long-running AI workflows and managing context efficiently to implementing observability, security, and operational best practices—and the architectural decisions that helped us overcome them.

Attendees will leave with practical patterns, lessons learned, and reference architectures that they can apply when building their own production AI platforms.

What attendees will learn
The architectural building blocks of a production AI platform
Designing provider-agnostic AI infrastructure
Orchestrating long-running AI workflows
Context management beyond simple prompt engineering
Operating AI workloads with observability and monitoring
Security and deployment considerations for enterprise AI
Lessons learned from building and open-sourcing a production platform

Target audience: AI engineers, platform engineers, backend engineers, DevOps/SRE practitioners, architects, and technical leaders building or operating AI systems in production.

This is a technical, experience-driven session based on lessons learned while building and operating Synkora, an open-source AI platform. The talk focuses on reusable architectural patterns, production challenges, trade-offs, failures, and practical lessons rather than product promotion.

Preferred duration: 35 minutes including Q&A. No special technical requirements beyond standard presentation facilities. The session may include architecture diagrams and selected examples from the open-source Synkora codebase.