Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya

Modern software systems are composed of many independent microservices spanning front ends, back ends, APIs, and AI models, and coordinating and scaling them reliably is a constant challenge. A workflow orchestration platform addresses this by providing a structured framework to define, execute, and monitor complex workflows with resilience and clarity. Orkas is an enterprise scale agentic orchestration platform that builds on the open source Conductor project, which was pioneered at Netflix. The platform coordinates AI agents, humans, and APIs with a focus on scalability, compliance, and trust. It further expands on the Conductor core by adding features like security, governance, and long running workflows. Viran Bareya is the founder and CTO at orcas, and he's the creator of Netflix Conductor. Vran joins the show with Gregor Vann to talk about his building Conductor at Netflix, the challenge of orchestrating microservices, rule based versus programmatic workflow orchestration, agentic orchestration, MCP integration, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Verein Barreya from Arcus. So we're gonna be talking all about what Arcus does and especially Arcus Conductor and some of you may already know the word conductor from some other companies and we're gonna be talking about that. But, yeah, welcome, Bahrain. Thanks, Gregor, for having me here and I'm very excited to be here. Yeah. So as we do on this podcast tradition, we just like to kind of get an understanding of your background. You've definitely worked at quite a few interesting companies that I think our audience will be fairly familiar with. But, yeah, just walk us through what's your kind of career path, I guess, to orcas. Yeah. I started orcas about close to getting four years now. And prior to orcas, I spent, like, in very different set of industries. Right? So before orcas, I spent almost few years at Google mostly working on developer products, so Firebase and Google Play. This is one a place where I got to kind of work with, you know, developer as one of the audiences. How do they interact with systems and how do you build for them? Which was also kind of one of the reasons why, you know, which kind of motivated me to build orcas. More interestingly, before Google, I spent my time at Netflix, which is where I was part of an infrastructure team that was responsible for building the platform for Netflix's back then very ambitious, you know, studio project. Right? Basically, the goal was to build the largest production studio in the world and to enable that. There is, of course, the whole production side, but at the same time, there was the engineering side in terms of building out the products and tools. And my team was responsible …