Platforms for the AI Era

Platforms for the AI Era is a Platform Engineering AI Meetup landing in Silicon Valley for people who build and run internal developer platforms, cloud-native infrastructure, and AI serving stacks. The August 27 night is a talk-plus-pizza format: six short practitioner talks, a drinks break, then wrap-up networking. Topics on the Luma agenda include distributed LLM inference, zero-trust data platforms, deterministic AI workflows on Kubernetes, AI-native testing, Mirantis’s k0rdent platform story, and AI-powered cardinality control. If you ship platforms that carry AI workloads, this is the South Bay practitioner room.

The Platform Engineering AI Meetup group is expanding from India and frames the San Jose stop as a joint event with Nutanix, Mirantis, and Nirmata, with CNCF roots in the mission statement. Hosts listed on Luma are Deepak Belani, Prithvi Raj, and Jim Bugwadia. Speakers named on the agenda come from Nutanix, Stitch Fix, Nirmata, Uber, Mirantis, and Nvidia. Complimentary food, drinks, and swag are listed on the invite. The CFP is closed, so you are coming to listen and compare notes, not to submit a new talk.

This night is right for platform engineers, SREs, and AI-infrastructure practitioners who can talk production constraints. Students and operators who already run Kubernetes or inference stacks will get more from the talks than a general founder mixer crowd. Skip if you need investor matchmaking, a pan-Asian membership social, or a pitch slot. Bring a concrete platform or inference problem, not a deck. Capacity is the product: only about 110 confirmed invites.

Thursday, August 27, 2026, 5:30 to 8:30 PM PDT at Nutanix, 1740 Technology Drive, San Jose, CA 95110, Room 120-Cranium. Check-in runs 5:30 to 6:00 PM. Talks start at 6:00, pizza at 6:45, more talks at 7:15, wrap and network 8:00 to 8:30. Technology Drive is South Bay campus geography, not SOMA. Building access instructions come in the confirmation; evening traffic is the commute tax.

RSVP on Luma and wait for a confirmed invite before you leave the Peninsula or the city. A complimentary food-and-swag badge is still not a walk-up. Same evening, ACG Silicon Valley’s C-Circle is in Palo Alto and Step SF’s Midway day is in Dogpatch; those are deal-community and festival graphs. Choose the room that matches the work you actually do.