Most technical interviews still ask a candidate to write a function on a whiteboard. Adam Witanowski says that question is already obsolete, and what should replace it says everything about how AI is changing who gets hired.
In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Adam Witanowski, AI Architect at nib, where he has spent the past several years building the insurer's AI engineering practice from the ground up. They get into why most enterprise AI projects underperform (nobody is measuring the right things), what "back pressure" means for AI-generated code, why Australian salaries can't compete with the US for senior AI talent, and why the technical interview needs a full rebuild.
It's a hands-on, practitioner's take on what's actually happening inside enterprise AI teams, not the conference-keynote version. They cover the real dollar gap between hiring an AI engineer in Australia versus the US, why "the whiteboard should come back" as an interview tool, how Adam built his own AI agent to interview for jobs on his behalf, and the testing harness his team uses to check whether AI-generated work is actually any good.
CHAPTERS
0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI investments don't work
0:44 - Who Adam Witanowski is, and why James wanted him on
2:06 - Welcome, and building an AI SDLC from scratch inside a regulated insurer
5:12 - What "back pressure" actually means, and why solo AI coding doesn't scale
10:52 - Startups vs enterprises: re-engineer whole processes, not thin slices
13:24 - Why most companies can't even measure the problem they're trying to solve
17:10 - Software eats the world, and why that makes engineers apex predators
19:44 - Build in-house or buy: the blind spots consulting companies won't tell you
23:57 - Forward deployed engineers, and the rise of the hybrid product-engineer
26:38 - Tangent: his 13-year-old builds an AI auto-aimbot
30:43 - Build, upskill or outsource: the renters, owners and caretakers test
34:18 - What AI talent actually wants beyond a bigger title
38:30 - The real dollar gap: $220K in Australia versus $500K in the US
46:37 - What to actually pay your first AI hire
49:01 - "What you don't measure, you can't change"
51:01 - Redesigning the interview: show me your harness
56:45 - Why the whiteboard should come back
58:38 - Building a harness to test his harness
1:03:46 - He built his own AI agent to interview for him
1:07:28 - Why motivation and taste still beat any technical test
1:12:19 - Apex predator, Jedi, stallion, unicorn: Adam's closing line
1:13:00 - James's takeaway: it's a measurement problem, not a technology problem
ABOUT THE GUEST
Adam Witanowski is an AI Architect at nib in Sydney, where he has built Prometheus, an integrated suite of agentic AI tools now running in production across the business. He works at the intersection of senior engineering and AI leadership, and has spoken publicly on enterprise AI engineering discipline, including harness design, testing and evals, and AI governance.
LINKS
Adam Witanowski, NIB · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/witanowski/
James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau/ · Site: https://ntptalent.com.au
Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.
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Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.
