Culture Doesn't Scale Itself: Leading Engineering Teams Through Hypergrowth and the AI Transition

Engineering culture is easy to talk about. It's much harder to carry it across seed-stage scrappiness, enterprise at scale, and an industry being restructured by AI—without losing what made the team good in the first place. That's the lived experience Thanos Baskous brings to this talk. Thanos has led engineering in some of the most demanding environments in tech: infrastructure at Coinbase during a critical growth period, Chief Architect at Blackstone where he led a company-wide DevOps transformation, and engineering roles at Twitter. Today he's Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Cogent Security, an AI-native vulnerability management platform that raised a $42M Series A six months after launch. Each of those environments asked the same question in a different way: how do you build a team culture that's durable enough to survive scale, honest enough to survive pressure, and flexible enough to survive a complete rethinking of how software gets built? In this session, Thanos will share what worked, and what broke, as he moved between hypergrowth startups, enterprise transformation programs, and the current shift to AI-native engineering. He'll get into the specific moments where culture either compounds or cracks: when you're scaling headcount faster than your processes, when AI tooling starts to blur the line between junior and senior, and when the team's identity is tied to practices that may not survive the next few months. This won't be a framework talk. Engineering leaders will walk out with actionable tactics addressing the one variable that determines whether a team scales or stalls: leadership.