What is LLM Context Windows & Context Engineering? Explained by Toni Ramchandani
This session takes a practical look inside LLM context windows and token consumption, exploring what happens when context enters a model - from tokenization, embeddings, attention, QKV, prefill, and decode to KV caching. It also examines how context windows are allocated and why simply increasing context length doesn’t always lead to better model performance.
The session then moves into practical context engineering, covering signal density, token reduction, identifying the minimum sufficient context for a task, and optimizing local LLM performance with Ollama. It offers practical insights into balancing context, memory, latency, cost, and quality when working with LLMs.
About Toni Ramchandani:
Toni Ramchandani is the Vice President of Applied AI Engineering at MSCI Inc., bringing over 17 years of experience in AI, data, cloud, and engineering execution. He specializes in enterprise AI agents, RAG, LLM evaluation, and AI observability to turn emerging tech into scalable, production-ready enterprise capabilities. Toni is also an author, having written A Generative Journey to AI, and an avid endurance athlete who regularly runs, rides, and hikes.
Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toni-ramchandani/
A big shoutout to our sponsors – BrowserStack for all their support in helping do these events at such a scale.
About The Test Tribe:
The Test Tribe is the World’s Largest Software Testing Community turned EdTech Startup. Started in 2018 with a mission to give Testing Craft the glory it deserves while we co-create Smarter, prouder, and more confident Testers. We take pride in solving upskilling and growth for global Testing professionals through our unique offerings like Expert Courses, Membership, Cohorts, Offline Mixers, online Community spaces, and a lot of global Events. Our offerings enable Software Testers globally to collaborate, learn, and grow together. With around 950+ Software Testing Events like Conferences, Hackathons, Meetups, Webinars, etc., and with other Community initiatives, we have reached a global footprint of over 173K+ Testers from 130+ Countries. We intend to provide life-altering growth to every single Testing professional on the planet through community and technology.