Software engineering is not what it used to be. By early 2026, nearly two-thirds of companies were generating most of their code with AI, saying that “AI coding tools are now the default”, with some teams expected to approach 90% within the year.
The title on the badge hasn’t changed much. The salary band might even look better. But the work itself – what happens between Monday morning standup and Friday close, now follows a different logic.
Instead of focusing on implementation, engineers are increasingly responsible for defining how systems should behave before a single line of code is generated. The work shifts toward structuring problems, setting constraints, reviewing machine output, and deciding what can be trusted in production.
At LeapXpert, a US-found enterprise communication platform with offices across seven countries, this reality plays out under stricter conditions than most. The company builds infrastructure where every message must be captured, traceable, and auditable. There is little tolerance for approximation. AI can accelerate parts of the workflow, but the system still has to hold under scrutiny – technically and regulatorily.
On April 15, a team of engineers from LeapXpert will step out of their day-to-day work and into the hall of WorkBetter 1.0 for their inaugural event in Sofia called Same Title, New Job: How AI is Redefining the Software Engineer.
The team will go through how this industry-wide transformation actually unfolds in daily work: how workflows are restructured around AI-assisted development, what it takes to define specifications that machines can execute reliably, where automated output breaks under real-world constraints, and how verification layers are designed to keep systems correct, traceable, and compliant.
Inside LeapXpert’s Engineering Environment
LeapXpert is a New York-headquartered enterprise communication platform, recognised twice as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving. The company enables regulated industries – finance, legal, telecoms – to communicate with clients over WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat and SMS in a way that is secure, traceable and compliant.
The team’s core expertise sits at the intersection of consumer messaging and enterprise-grade control: digital communications governance, compliant archiving, deep integration with platforms like Microsoft Teams, and the orchestration of communication flows across fragmented channels. Increasingly, LeapXpert is extending this into an intelligence layer, applying AI to supervise conversations, detect risk, and turn communication data into operational insight.
With over 170 employees across six continents and a Series B under its belt, LeapXpert has been scaling its engineering presence in Sofia as a dedicated hub, building the infrastructure that sits underneath some of the world’s most compliance-sensitive client communications.
In recent years, regulators have issued over $2 billion in fines to financial institutions for failing to properly archive and supervise digital communications. This is the environment LeapXpert operates in – one where every message must be captured, traceable, and reviewable, and where engineering decisions directly map to regulatory exposure.
Three Engineers, One Live Case Study
For engineers already working in this model, the change is less about tools and more about responsibility.
Ivo Delchev opens with the broader frame: why this moment is happening now, and what “same title, new job” means for teams that cannot trade speed for correctness.
He also points to a tension most organisations have not yet resolved:
“The thing most engineering leads won’t admit yet is that the way we evaluate engineers no longer maps to what actually makes them valuable. We’re still measuring code quality, PR velocity, test coverage – signals that made sense when humans were the primary authors, but no longer tell you who’s actually effective.
The role is shifting toward defining constraints, reviewing generated output, and catching architectural decisions made deeper in the system. What’s not always said out loud is that this should change how we evaluate engineers, because the job itself has already changed.”
This is the kind of conversation the event is designed to bring into the open how organisations need to rethink job descriptions, team structures and hiring.
Valeri Chakarov will focus on the role itself – how day-to-day work changes when AI executes, and what still separates a strong engineer from the rest.
Ivan Stoilov will walk the audience through a live case study of LeapXpert’s autonomous development pipeline, following a task from planning through AI execution to human verification.
After the talks, all three speakers will join a moderated discussion to examine the tradeoffs, the risks, and the moments where the model breaks down – when the engineer has to step back in and take control.
Who should be in the room?
This one is for experienced software engineers who are already asking these questions in their own work, and for team leads trying to understand what AI integration means for how they build and manage teams.
If you’ve been wondering whether your instincts about the role still hold, or what the engineers actually ahead of this curve are doing differently, April 15 is a good place to find out.
The event takes place on April 15, 2026 from 18:30 to 20:30 at Workbetter 1.0 X-stairs in Sofia. Attendance is free. Register here.
