Hi, I’m Annie Vella. I’m a software engineer at heart, and have been since I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, at the age of six. I was far more intrigued by learning BASIC than playing games, and from that moment I knew I wanted to build things with computers when I grew up. What hooked me then is what still drives me now: an insatiable curiosity, and a need to make sense of the world around me, right down to first principles.

That childhood obsession became a career spanning more than two decades. I’ve had the privilege of working across nearly a dozen industries in four countries. I started my career as a hands-on developer in New Zealand and Australia, moved into technical leadership across the UK and Europe, and eventually returned home to New Zealand - most recently as a Distinguished Engineer at Westpac NZ. Today I work independently as an engineering leader, researcher and advisor, at the intersection of AI adoption and governance, software engineering, and systems thinking - as at home with the engineers building systems as with the leaders shaping strategy.

These days, two related questions occupy most of my thinking: how AI is reshaping the practice of software engineering, and how organisations can adopt and govern agentic systems responsibly as they scale. On the engineering side, that means grappling with how AI is changing the very nature of the work itself, reshaping the craft, the roles, the team composition, and the careers. On the governance side, it’s the architectural patterns that let agentic systems scale safely: control planes, identity models, evaluation, observability, accountability, and risk-based autonomy. I find myself increasingly in conversations with technology leaders, researchers, and engineers about where all of this is heading, and I genuinely love those conversations.

A growing part of what I do bridges industry, research, and thought leadership. I recently submitted my Master of Engineering thesis at the University of Auckland on the impact of AI coding assistants on software engineering, and some of that research is already available as a preprint. I also serve on the Industry Advisory Board for the University’s Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering department, and I write and speak internationally on AI’s impact on the profession, including the occasional keynote.

That same curiosity, and the need it fuels to make sense of things, draws me to the theories of complex, emergent systems, from cybernetics and variety to active inference, control and promise theory, and the patterns of how things adapt and stay stable. Lately it has turned toward formal methods: the question of what we can actually prove about the systems we build, especially as they begin to act on our behalf. Quantum computing sits inside the same fascination: what becomes possible when computation itself works differently. And, influenced deeply by Deming, I believe excellence isn’t achieved through individual heroics, but by designing systems in which great work becomes the natural outcome.

When I’m not diving into tech, I’m a cat lover and a fan of all things horror.

If you’re wrestling with these same questions about AI, software engineering, or simply navigating this strange and uncertain moment, I’m always happy to connect. Feel free to get in touch.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own.