Why "Show Me Your Harness" Beats Any Coding Test: Adam Witanowski, AI Architect

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 is 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 any good.

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.

About the show

Building Tech Teams is hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent, and produced by Day One®, the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures’ Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI.