Build AI that delivers in production.
At QCon San Francisco 2026, discover how senior engineering teams are making AI reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, turning prototypes into systems that drive measurable business impact.
November 16–20, 2026
Hyatt Regency, San Francisco
Early Bird Deadline July 14th
Conference: $2,595
Secure early bird savings - deadline coming soon!
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AI & ML sessions at QCon San Francisco 2026
Skills, Memory, or Fine-Tuning? The Engineering Loop Behind Self-Improving Agents
As agents become mainstream, everyone wants to improve theirs either by making fewer mistakes on existing tasks or by taking on harder ones. This usually happens once an agent is already deployed in production.
Abhinav Sinha
CEO @Lucidic AI, Previously @Stanford AI Lab, @Citadel and Susquehanna International Group, and @Apple
Why Most Platform Teams Fail: The Adoption Problem Nobody Wants to Own
We have all seen the moment: the platform goes live, the launch deck looks sharp, the portal is polished, the golden paths are documented, and yet teams quietly continue doing things the old way. Not always because the platform is bad, but because adoption was assumed, not owned.
Shweta Vohra
Architecture Leader @Booking.com, Author of "Decoding Platform Engineering Patterns" & "Dear Software and AI Architect", 24+ Years Experience Building Cloud, Platform, and AI Systems
AI Inside and Out: New Guardrails for When AI Is Both Your Tool and Your User
AI is changing our systems from two directions simultaneously - and most teams are only watching one.
Adapt or Drift: Resilience Engineering When AI Moves the Operating Point
Resilient systems do not stay resilient by standing still. They survive by adapting. But adaptation comes with risk: under sustained pressure, organizations and systems can slowly drift toward failure while still appearing to operate normally.
Andrew Hatch
Engineering Leader and SRE Manager @Cisco ThousandEyes, With 25+ Years Building Software, Operations, SRE, and Platform Teams Across Australia, India, and the United States
Building a Data Platform with AI
Data platform sits at the intersection of infrastructure, governance, operations, and user experience.
Adaptive Systems in Production: What Recommendation Systems Can Teach Us About Agents
As organizations race to build AI agents, many teams are encountering challenges that feel new: evaluation uncertainty, feedback loops, behavioral drift, exploration versus exploitation, and maintaining user trust in systems that continuously adapt.
But these challenges are not new.
Mallika Rao
Senior Engineering Manager @Zocdoc, Previously @Netflix, @Twitter and @Walmart
The Revenge of the Data Scientist: Why Reliable AI Needs Evals, Traces, and Metrics
Most teams can now ship an AI prototype by calling a foundation-model API. The hard part is knowing whether that system works when real users, messy data, and business consequences arrive.
Hamel Husain
Machine Learning Engineer, 20+ Years in Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science
Progressive Failure Modes of Modern AI Serving Systems
Inference platforms fail in layers. Most organizations focus on model quality while underestimating the systems engineering required to operate production AI workloads safely and reliably at scale.
Abi Aryan
AI Infrastructure Engineer and Educator
Trainings
Thursday Nov 19 / 09:00AM PST / HALF DAY
Building AI Agents: A Practical Framework for Choosing the Right SDK
The AI agent ecosystem has exploded with options—Google's Agent Developing Kit, Claude SDK, OpenAI Agents, LangGraph, Pydantic AI, and more emerging monthly. But which one should you actually use?
Hien Luu
AI/ML Leader, Advisor, Speaker, and Author
Thursday Nov 19 / 01:00PM PST / HALF DAY
AI-Assisted Coding Master Class: Build Your Mission Control
Most engineers aren't spending enough time setting up their environment to get the most out of their coding agents.
Sepehr Khosravi
Machine Learning Platform Engineer @Coinbase, Award Winning Instructor @UC Berkeley - Gen-AI Bootcamp, Founder @AI Squads
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Explore the scheduleWhat you’ll learn
Real-world patterns from senior developers at the leading edge
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Daniela Miao
Co-Founder & CTO @Momento, Systems & Observability Nerd, ex-Lightstep, ex-DynamoDB
Nov 16
Architecting for Agents: Beneath the Loop
Julie Amundson
Senior AI Infrastructure Consultant, ex-Googler, ex-Netflixer
Nov 18
Something About Distributed Systems
Vidhya Arvind
Tech Lead & a Founding Architect for the Data Abstraction Platform @Netflix, Previously @Box and @Verizon
Nov 17
Staff+ Engineering Skills
Javier Fernandez-Ivern
Staff Software Engineer @Netflix with Over 24 Years in Software Engineering
Nov 17
Code Beyond Engineers & Engineering Teams
Suhail Patel
Principal Engineer @Monzo Focused on Designing and Operating Distributed Systems, Previously @Citymapper
Nov 18
Guardrails & Safety Nets (Evals) for the New Landscape
Tanya Reilly
Principal Engineer @Datadog, Author of "The Staff Engineer's Path", Likes Going Places on Trains
Nov 16
Modern API Design for Humans and Agents
Krys Flores
Staff Software Engineer @Crunchyroll, Host of O'Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Career Roadmap
Nov 16
Real World Platform Engineering
Daniel Bryant
Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager
Nov 18
Engineering the Developer Experience
Ankit Jain
Co-Founder & CEO @Aviator
Nov 18
Resilience Engineering: Everything Fails All the Time
Vanessa Huerta Granda
Resilience Engineering Manager @Enova, Co-Author of the Howie Guide on Post Incident Analysis, Board Member for the Resilience in Software Foundation
Nov 16
Engineering AI Systems
Melanie Zhao
Engineering Lead @BlackRock, Pioneering AI Adoption in Asset Management
Nov 17
Data Platforms Reimagined
Adi Polak
Director, Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering @Confluent, Author of "Scaling Machine Learning with Spark" and "High Performance Spark 2nd Edition"
Nov 17
The real challenges in AI now are reliability, scalability, and cost. At QCon San Francisco, you learn from the leaders in the field who are building AI systems that perform, scale, and create measurable business impact.
QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee Member, Sr. Engineering Manager @Zoox & Author of MLOps with Ray
Conversations that turn insight into impact
The scheduled sessions at QCon are the agenda, but the real value is in the unscripted moments: the whiteboard debates in an unconference, the candid advice over coffee, the speaker dinner stories about failures and trade-offs. That's the perspective you can't get from a screen.
Principal Solutions Architect, QCon Speaker, O'Reilly Author, YouTuber
QCon is designed for senior practitioners to move ideas forward and solve problems with peers.
Connect with senior developers who understand your challenges. Whether brainstorming new ideas, exploring learning paths, or engaging in casual conversations, our social events and learning spaces are designed for all interaction styles, helping you leave with fresh insights, new connections, and actionable ideas. See all Social Events See all Peer Sharing activities
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Unlock your potential at QCon San Francisco 2026
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Gain concrete strategies from 75+ hand picked speakers across 15 curated tracks.
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Real-world talks curated for depth, value, without hidden product pitches.
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Network with peers at Unconferences, in the 'hallway track', during extended breaks, over lunch, and at conference socials.
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Gain 12 months on-demand access to session recordings after the conference to continue your learning journey.