Adam Witanowski
AI Architect, nib
Adam Witanowski is an AI Architect at nib in Sydney, where he 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, having spent the past year rebuilding nib's software development lifecycle around AI agents. Witanowski speaks publicly on enterprise AI engineering discipline, including harness design, testing and evals, and AI governance, and has argued the traditional whiteboard coding test is obsolete for hiring in an AI-assisted engineering team. He discussed this on Day One's Building Tech Teams podcast in August 2026.
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of Nobody Knows What to Pay Anymore: A Building Tech Teams Best-Of you want.
- 0:00 Cold open: what should a 10x engineer be paid?
- 0:19 Nathan Hill: quantifying what AI is actually worth
- 1:05 Million-dollar salaries as a bet on future ROI
- 1:28 Adam Witanowski: nine companies, seven offers, real numbers
- 2:35 US$500k in the US vs $220k here: which one would you choose?
- 3:50 Why the gap is structural: funding, hyperscalers, enterprise mindset
- 5:37 Claudia Barriga-Larriviere: more productive, or just faster?
- 6:15 "What you don't measure, you can't change"
- 7:26 Matt McFarlane: the jump is too big, because you've been underpaying
- 8:32 Tokens are eating the people budget
Heard on
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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