Tinatin Balavadze
Engineer. Code. Systems. AI — for people.
Berlin, Germany
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Tinatin Balavadze is a Software Engineer at Zalando, working across mobile, AI-assisted development, and workflow design. Before writing code, she built learning systems, coached leaders, and designed programs that helped people think, learn, and scale.
Today, she blends engineering with systems thinking — teaching teams to reduce noise, protect focus, and build workflows that don’t burn out the humans using them.
Her talks connect code, cognition, and career design in ways that help people ship work and stay well.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Refactor Your Career: Build It Like Your Best Codebase
Bad code is painful.
So is a career that’s stuck, messy, or silently rotting in production.
As engineers, we don't tolerate technical debt—we refactor. We debug. We improve. So why don't we do the same for our careers?
In this talk, I’ll show you how to apply the principles of great software to the one codebase you ship every day: yourself. You’ll learn to spot the warning signs of career entropy, clean up outdated thinking, and redesign your path with version control, modular thinking, and personal CI/CD.
This isn’t a motivational talk. It’s a migration strategy. If your career is in maintenance mode—or if you’re overdue for a meaningful refactor—this is your roadmap to build again, better.
Who Should Attend
Engineers, leads, and ICs asking “What’s next?”
People in transition: promotion, burnout, new role, or reinvention
Anyone who’s great at building systems—but hasn’t built one for themselves yet.
Key Takeaways
Spot career “code smells” and identify the tech debt holding you back
Apply branching and merging strategies to real-life decisions
Use retrospectives, feature flags, and feedback loops to test bold moves safely
Design a career roadmap that scales—with room to pivot
Treat your growth like a system. Because it is.
Careers don’t crash overnight. They bitrot.
This talk is your git reset.
Refactor now—or risk legacy mode for good.
AI Won’t Replace You — But Your Workflow Might
The real risk isn’t AI.
It’s the architecture you use to run your day.
Most developers aren’t losing productivity because they “can’t focus.”
They’re losing it to context switching, cognitive overload, notification storms, and workflows held together with hope and muscle memory. If your workday were a production system, most of us would be in incident mode by lunch.
This talk reframes productivity through an engineer’s lens.
We debug the human layer the same way we debug code: finding bottlenecks, adding guardrails, setting SLOs, and designing defaults that don’t collapse under load.
You’ll learn how high-performing engineers use AI and automation not as shortcuts, but as latency reducers—quiet partners that free up cognitive space for real thinking, real design, and real output.
This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about upgrading the system that runs you.
You don’t need to outpace AI.
You need to outgrow the legacy workflow you’re still running.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Developers drowning in tabs, tasks, context switches, and “quick pings”
Tech leads who want their team’s minds to scale—not just their backlog
Makers, IT pros, and architects building with Copilot, agents, and automation
Anyone who wants clarity instead of chaos, and sustainable performance instead of burnout
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Understand why the real bottleneck isn’t AI—it’s human cognitive architecture, and why burnout is a design flaw, not a personal failure.
Learn how to apply engineering patterns to your own workflow: load balancing, batching, defaults, guardrails, and focus SLOs
Discover practical ways to partner with AI so it reduces friction instead of creating noise.
Adopt a human-first productivity model where success is measured by energy, focus, and flow—not busyness.
Cloud Tech Tallinn 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
DevFest Berlin 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Update Conference Prague 2025 Sessionize Event
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