Ruslan Belkin (Head of Platform Engineering @ Inflection AI) joins us to deconstruct fundamental shifts in engineering leadership. We explore the future of user interfaces, his “sci-fi” approach to establish & test product vision, & how to leverage “investor decks” for better decision-making and project validation. Ruslan also dives into the complexities of building emotional intelligence into AI systems, cultivating an outcome-oriented engineering culture & avoiding process traps. Plus, we discuss how to keep up with the velocity of change (including when new research necessitates a major pivot), synthetic data & the future of data as a defensibility strategy, & why agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead.
Ruslan Belkin joined Inflection after co-founding Jelled.ai—acquired by Inflection in 2024—and previously served as CTO of Nauto. Earlier in his career, Ruslan held senior engineering roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, Netscape, and other pioneering Silicon-Valley companies, bringing more than two decades of experience at the intersection of data platforms and machine learning.
SHOW NOTES:
- How leading engineering teams is evolving: Moving from code as the source of truth to specs/documentation as the source of truth (2:44)
- Why an eng org’s good hygiene / health will create better output (5:12)
- A framework for product vision: Envisioning the future "viscerally" like a sci-fi novel, stress-testing assumptions, and focusing smart people on the problem (9:04)
- Hiring in the modern era: Why software engineering is becoming "tooling and data engineering" and the importance of hiring for openness to new research (18:20)
- Gen Z vs. Millennial engineers: Ruslan’s observation that Gen Z is more outcome-oriented and has a lower tolerance for "corporate euphemisms." (22:24)
- Ruslan’s favorite frameworks for effective decision making: Using an "investment deck" to validate projects, avoid disbelief and lack of focus. (25:19)
- Keeping up with the velocity of change: How to curate research inputs and determine when a new paper (like DeepSeek) requires a strategic pivot. (32:57)
- The new burden of leadership: Why the velocity of AI requires leaders to be "right more often" and how to use models to increase research rigor. (36:27)
- The "Data Wall" and Synthetic Data: Why we have hit the wall for text data and how synthetic data generation loops will drive the next wave of defensibility. (41:35)
- The "March of 9s": Analyzing the trajectory of the AI market and why increasing agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead. (46:25)
- Rapid fire questions (48:18)
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LINKS AND RESOURCES
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast 
