The Reality of AI Infrastructure in 2026.
In Conversation with Brad Heller
Welcome to ‘In Conversation With’ — a series by QXi Group, featuring the voices behind Montash, Remobi and Trillion.
In this episode, Montash Managing Consultant Ash Fellows speaks with Brad Heller, Co-Founder and CTO of Tower.dev. Brad previously ran the control plane team at Snowflake and now focuses on building developer tooling that helps data engineers work with more composable, integrated infrastructure.
The conversation reflects many of the themes shaping cloud and AI infrastructure in 2026, including discussions taking place across the industry at events such as Tech Show London.
Market Reality in Cloud and AI Infrastructure
Ash Fellows (AF): From your perspective, what does the current landscape look like for engineering teams working in cloud and AI infrastructure?
Brad Heller (BH):
“We’re in a moment where the pace of change is really high… particularly on the AI side. At the same time, a lot of the underlying infrastructure challenges haven’t really gone away.”
Infrastructure Bottlenecks and Industry Challenges
AF: When people talk about bottlenecks in AI infrastructure, hardware often comes up first. Do you see it the same way?
BH: “The industry will continue to be constrained on senior engineer hiring. Platform engineers, distributed systems engineers… people who understand infrastructure deeply — those are the hardest to find.”
AF: So even as systems evolve, the core challenge is still people?
BH: “Yeah… building and operating infrastructure at scale is still hard. The systems still need to scale, integrate properly, and run reliably.”
AI Adoption in Engineering Teams
AF: How is AI changing the way engineering teams work day to day?
BH: “The process of writing code has gotten amplified… good engineers are made even more powerful. But the process of building and managing infrastructure hasn’t really gotten any better at all. It’s largely untouched by the AI shift.”
AF: What does that mean for how infrastructure needs to evolve?
BH: “I think it needs to become more AI-native. More headless, more API-driven… easier for systems to interact with each other.”
Hiring Challenges and Skills Shortages
AF: There’s a lot of discussion about whether AI reduces the need for experienced engineers. What’s your view?
BH: “The way we differentiate senior engineers from principal engineers is their ability to reason about trade-offs in different approaches to solving a problem. It’s not just about the syntax. It's about understanding and decomposing the problem.”
AF: How are you thinking about building teams in that environment?
BH: “We use contractors to solve very specific problems on the team. When we need expertise to drive a strategic area of the company forward, we hire FTEs.”
AF: Has anything changed in the skills you value in engineers?
BH: “Communicating with an LLM is actually more complicated… you have to communicate in a more precise, thorough way. Being willing to experiment… test your own assumptions… is a good thing in this new world.”
Future Outlook for Infrastructure and Engineering Teams
AF: Are you seeing any shifts in how teams are approaching AI models themselves?
BH: “Small language models have been super interesting, both from a cost perspective, but also because you need fewer GPUs. I have the same conversation every week with guys in fintech… they’re squeezing these small models to make better trading decisions.”
AF: How are organisations thinking about cost at the moment?
BH: “The dirty little secret in the industry right now is that no one actually is. It’s an arms race. Everyone is beholden to these massive token bills… it’s just the cost of doing business right now.”
Closing Insights and Advice
AF: For engineering leaders trying to navigate all of this, what would you focus on?
BH: “Don’t panic. It’s going to be okay. Figure out how to work with these tools… they’re not going away. You want to be remembered as one of the companies that leaned in, not one of the companies that leaned out.”
AI is changing how teams write code, but infrastructure still demands experience, judgement and the ability to reason through complex systems.
At Montash, we partner with organisations to hire the engineers behind those systems. From platform and distributed systems specialists to leaders shaping long-term infrastructure strategy. If you’re hiring in this space, get in touch.
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To get in touch with Ash Fellows and learn more about Brad Heller, head to LinkedIn to connect.
