TALK
WED MAY 6 • 3:00 PM - 3:45 PM
Lightning Round Talks
Lessons learned from building fast, open source infrastructure for web agents
Catherine Jue | kernel.sh
Kernel builds fast, open source infrastructure that lets AI agents access the internet. To hit our sub‑150ms browser boot times, we evolved our stack from containers to unikernels to microVMs. This talk walks through what we learned with each iteration, and what it actually takes to make serverless browsers not just fast, but reliable at scale with long-running “entity workflows” in Temporal.
From nothing to everything: one single alert to managing datacenters with AI
Ryan Stevens | ZoomInfo
Jack Burns is a Staff Software Engineer at Nordstrom where he gets to play with distributed systems and workflow orchestration. He's been in the Temporal ecosystem since the Cadence days at Uber and has stuck around as both a user and contributor ever since. These days, Jack leads Nordstrom's Temporal Platform and spends a lot of time thinking about how AI and orchestration can work better together.
Catherine Jue is a second-time founder and currently the Co-Founder and CEO of KERNEL, where she and her team build crazy fast, open source infrastructure for AI agents to access the internet. She also happens to be a former Taekwondo champion.
Bio coming soon.
Ryan Stevens is a hands-on AI engineering leader at ZoomInfo, where he builds the runtime, platform, and evaluation systems behind production agent workflows. His work spans multi-agent orchestration, Temporal-powered async execution, streaming UX, and the engineering tradeoffs required to make agent systems scalable, observable, and reliable. Previously, Ryan co-founded two AI companies focused on travel and recruiting.