NY AI Engineers: July w/ Clay, Integral Ad Science, & Paces Presenting

Our July edition of the New York AI Engineers Tech Talk brought together one of our strongest crowds yet. Dozens of AI engineers, data scientists, and fullstack developers joined us in NYC for an evening of practical demos, real engineering challenges, and honest conversations about building with LLMs in production.

Designed by engineers for engineers, this series cuts out the fluff and focuses on what matters most: how teams are actually shipping AI powered products, what breaks along the way, and the creative solutions they use to get things working in the real world.

What Happened

We kicked off the night with networking, pizza, and drinks, giving attendees a chance to connect with fellow builders working across the AI application layer. The room included engineers from early-stage startups, data scientists from scaled tech companies, and founders exploring what LLMs make possible inside their products.

After the social hour, we moved into three rapid-fire tech talks where presenters walked through the systems they built, the decisions behind them, and the lessons they learned.

July Presenters

Jeff Barg, Head of AI at Clay

Shared how Clay’s team is scaling agentic workflows in production and the technical constraints that shaped their approach.

Joyce Xu, AI Engineer at Paces

Walked through her process for evaluating new LLM architectures and designing experiments that translate to real-world performance.

Daniel Hillary, Senior Staff Data Scientist at Integral Ad Science

Dove into how IAS applies machine learning at scale, including model monitoring, data quality challenges, and system reliability.

Who Attended

This month’s crowd included:
• Software engineers
• AI and ML engineers
• Data scientists
• Technical founders
• Developers experimenting with LLMs, agents, and AI-powered features

It was a casual, high-signal environment built for people who actually ship code, solve hard technical problems, and want to see how others are approaching similar challenges.