About Me

I'm Leonardo Borges, Chief Engineer for GenAI at Commonwealth Bank, where I lead the technical strategy for GenAI adoption across one of Australia's largest enterprises.

Previously, I was Senior Director of AI Engineering at Optus, leading a team of 70 across platform engineering, data, and applied AI. Before that, I held engineering and leadership roles at Canva, Zip Co, Atlassian, and ThoughtWorks.

I write “The LeadTech Diet”, a newsletter for senior engineering leaders navigating AI transformation — with a bias towards what actually works over what sounds good in a keynote.

Leonardo Borges

Speaking & Conferences

Talks & Events

I speak from time to time on AI engineering, leadership, and the organisational challenges of AI adoption:

  • •InfoQ
  • •EuroClojure
  • •Sydney Cloud Native Development Summit
  • •Melbourne AI Engineering Summit
  • •UTS (University of Technology Sydney)

Background

20+ Years in Software

I've been in software engineering for over 20 years. I started as a full-stack developer, wrote a book on Clojure Reactive Programming in 2015, and gradually moved into leadership — though I've recently swung back towards the technical end of the pendulum.

I believe the best engineering leaders stay close enough to the work to have informed opinions, and far enough away to let their teams own it.

When I'm not working, I'm probably building voice AI agents from inconvenient locations, reading strategy books, or trying to explain to my family what “vibe coding” means.

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