Amir Mohtasebi
Head of Engineering Architecture
Trade Me
Lightweight Architecture Governance in the Age of AI
Presented with Brian Wang
October 22 — Conference Day · 4:35 PM – 5:00 PM
AI is accelerating delivery, and governance is struggling to keep up. Our lightweight governance model works well when delivery moves at human speed. But as AI speeds up how we design and build, it gets harder to know whether what we ship still aligns with the decisions we've made. And because AI is a multiplier, poor architectural choices don't just slip through; they get amplified.
If AI can accelerate delivery, it can accelerate governance too. We built an agent that reviews technical artefacts against our recorded architectural decisions and flags where they drift. It's not a gate. It surfaces misalignment early, while it's still cheap to fix, and starts the conversation so engineers keep their momentum.
We'll share the principles guiding how we're building it: keeping humans in the loop as the judges of what counts as governance, and using evals to help the agent get better over time.
Amir Mohtasebi is Head of Engineering and Architecture at Trade Me, New Zealand's largest online marketplace. He champions lightweight, decentralised architecture practices that give teams autonomy without sacrificing coherence. Amir is passionate about team topologies, developer experience and treating platforms as products, and he's exploring how these ideas must evolve in the age of AI.
