In 2026, scaling complex organisations with open source at the core is a flywheel of complexity: more countries, evolving regulation, and growing dependencies. All while modernising systems that must never stop running, and in a geopolitical landscape that turns dependencies into vulnerabilities overnight.

In this keynote, we explore how organisations can weave an invisible thread across teams: aligning architecture, platform engineering, infrastructure, and product thinking to build shared resilience, portability, and long-term sovereignty.

Where it matters most, open source becomes a strategic enabler: more transparency, more control, and the ability to own and maintain the critical layers of your stack.

Devoxx

ING's CTO shares lessons from scaling engineering at a major bank with 15,000+ engineers across 3,000 tribes and 400 squads. Key themes include the toxicity of absolute autonomy at scale, the failure modes of waterfall, agile, and DevOps when applied without guardrails, and the emerging role of platform engineering as the next paradigm after the full-stack engineer era. The talk covers how agentic AI risks amplifying existing complexity unless paired with segregated control agents and mature SDLC pipelines. Platform engineering is positioned as the connective tissue between infrastructure, architecture, and security, enabling engineers to focus on business value while enforcing non-negotiable guardrails. Vibe coding is dismissed as the 'Excel version of coding,' and a concern is raised about how the next generation of architects will develop deep skills if foundational work is delegated to AI.

The invisible thread: Scaling under regulation and geopolitical risk by Daniele Tonella