The iGaming calendar is packed. Every month brings another conference focused on regulation, market expansion, partnerships, or business development. Yet, for the people building the technology behind the industry, those events often leave one question unanswered: What can I actually take back to my team?

That question became the starting point for Tech Race Summit, a new cross-industry technology conference organised by SOFTSWISS on 10 September in Warsaw.

We spoke with Sergey Kastukevich, Chief Technology Officer at SOFTSWISS, about why iGaming has reached a point where it needs its own technical conversation.

iGaming has no shortage of conferences. Why launch another one?

Because most conferences are not built for engineers. You have plenty of options for the business side – market expansion, licensing, commercial partnerships, and so on.

Besides, too often, conferences become marketing exercises. Companies spend twenty minutes explaining how great their products are. It becomes a competition to attract customers wrapped in the language of a conference.

But what the industry lacks is a dedicated space for the people building the platforms. Architects and developers need a different format – and right now, they mostly don’t have lots of opportunities.

As an engineer myself, I want to leave an event with something useful. That’s why our Tech Race is a kind of opposite of what the industry is used to. We will share ideas, practical lessons, and insights into where technology is heading. 

I want people to leave thinking differently about their own products and engineering challenges.

Is iGaming at the right stage for that kind of conversation?

I think it passed that stage a while ago. Behind every casino session or sportsbook bet sits a very sophisticated engineering system. High-load infrastructure. Payment orchestration. Compliance. Fraud prevention. AI. Real-time analytics. Personalisation.

Platforms now handle millions of concurrent users, process transactions in milliseconds, and operate under regulatory frameworks that rival financial services in their complexity. 

All these topics deserve more than one technical panel squeezed between commercial presentations. That level of technical maturity needs a proper forum where tech leaders present concrete case studies and discuss real failures. 

Most tech conferences claim to be different. How will you distinguish?

We will have no product pitches and vanity metrics. If someone gets on stage and says, “Look how great we are. Here’s what we built”, that’s not for us. I want people to leave with a clear idea of what to do next with their own product.

Besides, the speaker lineup already sets us apart. We have people from Google, AWS, Oracle, and Cloudflare in the same room. That density of expertise is rare at any event.

But great speakers can still produce a mediocre conference. So we split the programme into three tracks. 

The Vision track asks speakers to describe how the technology horizon will shift in the next six to twelve months – no product talk, just their genuine view of what is coming. Hearing that from companies at that level, and then building your own strategy from it – that is worth travelling for.

The Solution track will provide concrete answers to common engineering problems and real cases you can take back and use. 

And the Experiment track is for the niche bold things many people discuss, but few actually do. 

Why bring companies like AWS, Oracle, Cloudflare, and Google into the same programme as iGaming speakers?

Because the challenges are more similar than most people expect. 

Whether you work in iGaming, banking, e-commerce, or cloud infrastructure, you face the same questions: scalability, compliance, real-time data, personalisation, and security. The engineering language is the same – Go, Java, JavaScript – and the enterprise problems underneath are similar too.

When you stay inside your own industry, your solutions stay there as well. Step into a conversation with someone from a different sector, and unexpected ideas appear. A good example from our own experience: we worked with Rubens Barrichello, a Formula 1 legend. His first comment when we met was that IT is a huge part of modern racing – telemetry, real-time pilot monitoring, all of it under load. You talk to someone from a completely different field, and you come away with a dozen new ideas.

That’s why we wanted a cross-industry format. Innovation often happens where different perspectives meet.

The programme includes many AI sessions. Is there a risk of every talk sounding the same?

It is a real risk. We joked internally that AI is the new high-load – the way high-load architecture was the hot topic five years ago. Everyone has a talk about it.

But ignoring it would be just as wrong. In iGaming, the cost of falling behind is immediate: a development team that has not adapted to AI-assisted workflows loses speed to competitors that have. 

So the challenge is making sure AI talks are actually useful. We did not want generic presentations saying AI changes everything. Everyone already knows that.

Instead, we asked speakers to explain what AI actually changes inside their organisations. What worked. What failed. What surprised them.

The bar is: don’t tell me you did it. Show me how.

Who should attend Tech Race?

Obviously, CTOs and engineering leaders. But not only them. Good engineering organisations do not rely on one person having all the answers.

Software engineers, architects, product managers, engineering managers, infrastructure specialists, security professionals, but also business lines and even founders. They all face different versions of the same technological challenges.

We also invited university students because today’s graduates will become tomorrow’s engineering leaders.

If we want stronger technology communities, we need those conversations to start early.

How will you know that Tech Race was a success?

That is actually easy. You can’t fake it.

Recently, we ran an internal AI hackathon in our Poznan office. Every team, from engineering to legal and finance, was building something. There was an electric tension in the room – you could see it in everyone’s eyes.

People were building things, challenging each other’s ideas, and solving problems together. Nobody wanted to leave because every conversation led to another.

That is what I hope happens at Tech Race. People walking out charged up, already thinking about a problem they can solve when they get back to work. If that happens, we got it right.

Tech Race Summit 2026 takes place on 10 September in Warsaw. The programme features 30+ speakers from companies such as AWS, Google, Oracle, Cloudflare, Fastly, and Gcore. Headline speaker: Andrey Doronichev, founder and CEO of OPTIC, formerly of Google and YouTube.

The tickets are available at techracesummit.com.