Sr Dir @ Twilio | AI, Judgment, and Engineering at Massive Scale

Bhavin Surela leads large-scale messaging engineering at Twilio, where his teams handle WhatsApp, RCS, and OTT channels at a scale of billions of interactions a day. Some of those messages are OTP flows, ambulance dispatches, and banking transactions, so fast, reliable, and trustworthy aren't nice-to-haves.

Bhavin and Josh get into why operational discipline matters more in the AI era, not less. His framing: AI is a magnifying glass. If you already have good rigor, you're shipping faster. If you didn't, you're hitting walls.

They cover how Twilio keeps innovation decentralized while keeping technology choices tight (so teams move fast without tech sprawl), why judgment and subject matter expertise are becoming the scarce commodity, and where Bhavin lands on the "team of one plus agents" prediction (spoiler: he's not buying it yet).

They close on something every remote leader is wrestling with: how do you keep people actually talking to each other when it's easier to just ask the AI?

*About Our Guest*
Bhavin Surela leads large-scale messaging engineering at Twilio, running a fully remote org of engineers organized around business outcomes: onboarding, message delivery, and content management across WhatsApp, RCS, and other channels. His teams operate end-to-end, full-stack, at a scale of billions of interactions a day, where reliability is non-negotiable. He's spent years investing in operational discipline at scale, and he's a clear-eyed voice on what AI does and doesn't change about that work.

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