Big Data Week

🔵 RAG can look simple on a whiteboard: ingest documents, create embeddings, retrieve context, ask a model. Building a reliable AI system around that flow is much harder. At Big Data Week Bucharest, Stefan Koehler, Founder & Architect at PrAIvate, will share a field report from engineering a privacy-first open-source RAG platform and the practical conditions that made rapid iteration possible.

His session goes beyond the basic pipeline to focus on the engineering realities underneath it: reproducible infrastructure, build pipelines, testing and evaluation frameworks, observability, explicit agent configuration, and the repeated architectural reassessment needed to keep complex AI systems robust and adaptable.

More details on https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/ragtime-lessons-from-engineering-an-ai-system/

🔵 AI can now generate code in seconds. But why do teams still see such different results when the same tools are introduced into everyday work? At Big Data Week Bucharest, Dan-Mihai Dinu, CTO at SOLO Fintech, will take the stage to explore what actually changed inside engineering teams once AI stopped being a future trend and became part of the daily workflow.

Drawing on leadership experience across some of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies, Dan will look beyond the tooling itself and focus on the harder shift underneath: how teams adapt, where performance gaps start to widen, and what parts of the job matter more now that coding is no longer the hardest part.

More details on https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/freefall-when-coding-stopped-being-the-hard-part/

With a mission to help organizations bring AI to their data wherever it lives, Cloudera returns to BDW Bucharest Conference 2026 as a Platinum Partner! ✨
A pioneer in big data and a trusted leader in data and AI, Cloudera has brought valuable insights to our community year after year - and we’re excited to welcome them back for another inspiring edition.

🟦 Want to see how a real-time data pipeline comes together from API to dashboard? Join Mircea Rugina, Senior Engineering Manager at LSEG, for a practical workshop built around an end-to-end open-source stack and a real example based on live flight data.

Participants will walk through ingestion from an API, event streaming with Apache Kafka, storage in PostgreSQL, transformation with dbt, orchestration with Apache Airflow, and visualization in Apache Superset. Expect a session focused on how these components work together in practice, while also exploring the architectural trade-offs and practical challenges that emerge in real implementations.

Find out more: https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/from-api-to-dashboard-building-a-real-time-data-pipeline-with-open-source-tools/

🔵 How do you run Spark batch processing for payment data at scale without managing clusters or Docker images? At Big Data Week Bucharest, Ioana Teoc, Director of Engineering at Worldpay UK, will share how her team processes around 100 million payment events daily, generating roughly 670 million records for reporting before aggregating them down to about 200,000 final records.

Drawing on hands-on experience modernizing business-critical systems, Ioana will walk through Worldpay’s migration to AWS EMR Serverless, the move away from legacy batch processing, and the architectural choices that improved scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency, including the adoption of S3 Tables as an alternative persistence layer.
More details at: https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/processing-payments-big-data-with-aws-emr-serverless-and-s3-tables/

Only three days left to secure your Early Bird ticket for Big Data Week Bucharest Conference! Current prices are available through Sunday, September 6.

Join us for two days of practical insights, real-world case studies, and expert perspectives on how modern data architectures and AI solutions are being successfully deployed in practice - explored through main stage talks and interactive workshops.

We can’t wait to see you there! ✨
https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/tickets/

🔵 The AI landscape has moved from API wrappers to high-throughput enterprise data pipelines, and that shift comes with a brutal trade-off. Charles Aad, Field CTO EMEA at Cloudera, will take the stage to address it directly: how do you train, fine-tune, and deploy models across distributed IoT and edge nodes without latency bottlenecks, compliance breaks, or data leakage?

Drawing on battle-tested implementations, Charles will break down how global engineering teams solve the "data anywhere" problem across heterogeneous environments without sacrificing throughput, governance, or ex*****on speed.

✨ Read more details about his speech on https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/beyond-the-hype-building-production-ready-data-ai-for-a-brave-new-world/

🔵 Organizations are investing heavily in data platforms and AI, but the reliability of both depends on something that gets far less attention: how data actually moves between operational systems. Lucian Neghina, Head of Data Engineering at esolutions.tech, and Radu Bogdan, Technical Lead at Tchibo, will take the stage to share the architectural principles behind an integration platform built to be AI-ready.

Their session draws the line between an Integration Platform and a Data Platform, and goes beyond architecture diagrams into the real challenges: event-driven integration, streaming, schema evolution, data contracts, reference-data enrichment, observability, and cost optimization.

✨ Read more details about their speech on https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/integration-platform-the-foundation-of-an-ai-ready-data-platform/

🔵 Migrating ~100 autonomous teams to a new technology stack usually takes a year. At Zalando, a small platform team did it in three months. Eugene Klyuchnikov, Principal Data Platform Engineer at Zalando, will take the stage to share the architectural and organizational blueprint behind that shift, including the move to a new event-tracking platform and dozens of data pipelines along with it.

His talk covers how treating migration as a product gave domain teams flexible adoption paths, how the team resolved the "orphan pipeline" dilemma without assigning blame, and how the effort cut compute costs by 52% while eliminating cross-cloud egress fees.

✨ Read more details about his speech on https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/session/surviving-the-100-team-shift-architecting-accountability-at-scale/

The first speakers for Big Data Week Bucharest 2026 have been announced, and this is just the beginning.🤩
From Kubernetes resource optimization, decision intelligence, and GenAI in financial services to real-time lakehouse, scaling data ownership, and executing large-scale migrations without business disruption, the first confirmed sessions already bring together practical insights and real-world case studies. And there’s more to come.

🎟️ Early Bird tickets are available for 2 more weeks, so now is the best time to secure your spot and join us for another amazing edition of Big Data Week Bucharest.

Get your ticket: https://bucharest.bigdataweek.com/