AI Engineer WF 2026
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Speakers/Giselle van Dongen
Giselle van Dongen

Giselle van Dongen

Restate

@vdgiselle

Giselle is a Developer Advocate and Engineer at Restate. She works on integrations between Restate and the AI ecosystem and helps its users with understanding how Restate simplifies the development of durable agents and backends. Before that, she worked in the field of data science, big data analytics, and stream processing, and obtained a PhD on this topic at Ghent University.

Sessions (1)

🎵 Every step you take, every call you make - the reliable agent stack
1:55 PM·Main Stage

In this session, we skip past the demos that work only on your laptop, and go straight to how you can build production-ready agents with a stack that covers all the hard bits of backend development that you don’t want to be bothered with when developing your agents: - Failure resiliency: retries, timeouts, and exactly-once execution so a flaky API or a crashed process doesn't corrupt your agent's state or makes them start from scratch - Durable Sessions: a session store with built-in conversation isolation and protection against corruption from concurrent agents - Pause/resume for human approvals: survive human approvals and research that take weeks without building complex infra - Agent-to-agent messaging layer: call agents developed by other teams or running on other infra with resilient HTTP calls - A kill switch: cancel a running agent cleanly at any point, without leaving half-executed work behind We will demonstrate each concept with live code examples, using Python, OpenAI Agents SDK and Restate as open-source Durable Execution engine. All examples are generally applicable: pick your favorite agent SDK (OpenAI Agents, Pydantic AI, Vercel AI, Google ADK,…) or go wild and implement low-level custom agents by just tying together LLM calls with custom logic.

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