Tech Race Summit: SOFTSWISS Warsaw event to draw SA tech experts amid rising digital infrastructure demands
CAPE TOWN – The dual pressures of systemic platform instability and a critical deficit in senior software engineering talent are forcing South African technical leaders to look beyond local borders for solutions to architectural tech challenges. This coincides with the final global call for speakers at the upcoming Tech Race Summit, a high-load digital infrastructure conference taking place in Warsaw, Poland, on 10 September 2026.
Organised by global technology provider SOFTSWISS, which has firmly established authority in South Africa’s responsible gambling and iGaming sector, the summit represents a coming-together of cross-industry digital infrastructure giants and users – including the likes of Oracle and AWS. The event focuses on the engineering realities of running high-load digital products under extreme stress – a challenge that is rapidly intensifying across high-traffic and highly regulated South African online betting, fintech, and banking sectors. SOFTSWISS is extending its final call for speakers to South African tech professionals who will have until 10 June to apply.
The urgency for technical depth is highlighted by the recent SOFTSWISS SiGMA Africa 2026 Survey, which independently polled verified South African industry decision-makers, operators, and regulators. The data revealed that platform stability and system resilience now rank as the absolute top technical priority for local organisations in 2026. This focus is driven by a domestic market that has scaled at a pace that often even outstrips existing local hosting, cloud, and database architectures.
Compounding this structural pressure is a severe regional talent squeeze. The 2026 iGaming Talent Trends report, compiled by SOFTSWISS and recruitment specialist Pentasia, shows that the hardest roles to fill in the technology sector are in DevOps, core backend engineering, and cybersecurity. Local organisations are actively hunting for mid-to-senior professionals who can manage massive transaction volumes, prevent downtime, and build resilient infrastructure.
“The iGaming industry has grown to a level of technical complexity that demands its own conversation and its own community,” says Sergey Kastukevich, Chief Technology Officer at SOFTSWISS. “What we kept hearing from CTOs, engineers, and tech leaders across the industry was that they wanted a space to go deep: real architecture discussions, honest post-mortems, hard-won knowledge from people solving similar problems at scale. That space did not exist, so we built it.”
While the event is rooted in the high-performance demands of global online gaming, the organisers emphasise that the technical challenges are universal. High-load environments in finance, transactional banking, and large-scale digital retail face the identical engineering bottlenecks. To address this, the summit features cross-industry panel discussions that bring together technical leaders alongside specialists from broader enterprise sectors.
The final call for speakers offers a unique opportunity for South African technical talent to secure a global stage. The final deadline for applications to be a speaker is 10 June. The summit features three distinct tracks: Vision (macro-level insights for executive leaders), Solution (technical deep dives and case studies), and Experiment (hands-on sessions exploring experimental approaches).
For the Experiment Track, the organisers are specifically looking for engineers and architects who are ready to share live demonstrations, emerging tools, unconventional workflows, innovative applications of AI, or ambitious infrastructure experiments. South African dev teams, who frequently engineer highly creative workarounds to manage local bandwidth and infrastructure constraints, are prime candidates to present their real-world findings.
Selected speakers will present their work alongside engineering teams from global infrastructure giants, including Amazon, Oracle, Cloudflare, Fastly, and ScyllaDB.
The Tech Race Summit takes place at the Centrum Praskie Koneser in Warsaw on 10 September 2026. Around 1,000 technical specialists, architects, and technology executives are expected to attend. Early bird tickets are available on the official Tech Race Summit website until 30 June 2026.
About SOFTSWISS
SOFTSWISS is a global technology company supplying software solutions for the iGaming industry since 2009. Supported by a team of more than 2 000 experts, SOFTSWISS serves more than 1 000 global brands through its comprehensive product ecosystem. Today, SOFTSWISS continues to leverage advanced technologies and champion responsible gaming across the globe from its offices in Malta, Poland, and Georgia.
