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 August 11th

Conference: $2,715

Secure early bird savings - deadline coming soon!
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AI & ML sessions at QCon San Francisco 2026

Use AI to Multiply Your Team as a Staff Engineer

Most "AI for engineers" content is about typing faster. That's IC-level work. Staff engineers have a different question to answer. When AI raises the floor on what every engineer can ship, what is the staff engineer's job, and where does the leverage actually come from now?

The Death of the Code Review

Code review was built for a world where humans wrote all the code.

Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss

Head of Developer Relations @Arize AI, Co-Founder of npm, Inc., Developer for 30+ Years

Avoiding Prompt Debt: Building Resiliant AI Apps that Grow With the Ecosystem

Details coming soon.

Drew Breunig

Drew Breunig

CEO & Cofounder CMPND, Editor of O'Reilly's "Context Management Handbook", Writer on AI & Data at dbreunig.com, Previously Data Science & Product Lead PlaceIQ

The Rise of Agent Enablement: Coding Agents Don't Scale Themselves. Neither Do Your Teams.

In 2009, every big enterprise said "continuous delivery won't work here." In 2026, the same rooms say "the dark factory won't work here." It was never about the technology being ready. It's about the organization being ready. Readiness is a socio-technical problem, not a technical one.

Patrick Debois

Patrick Debois

AI Product Engineer @Tessl, Co-Author of the "DevOps Handbook", Content Curator at AI Native Developer Community

Platform Engineering for Agents

Agentic tools amplify what’s already in the codebase. The agent works through your code, your architecture decisions, and the documentation around them. It follows what it can read and guesses at the rest.

Mark Khuzam

Mark Khuzam

Senior Software Engineer @Netflix, Previously Led the Consumer Web Platform Team @OpenTable

The Schema Was Never Enough: The World in Protocols

Every reliable process in the world is a protocol: auctions, double-entry bookkeeping, brokerage account transfers, or APIs. Protocols reduce ambiguity but the world remains messy.

Ryan  Scott Brown

Ryan Scott Brown

Principal Engineer @Crunchyroll, Previously @Red Hat, @Trek10, and @Vendia

How to Build a Real-Time Voice Agent

A voice agent looks like a chatbot with a microphone.

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

Abhinav Sinha

CEO @Lucidic AI, Previously @Stanford AI Lab, @Citadel and Susquehanna International Group, and @Apple

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.

Daria Barteneva

Daria Barteneva

Principal Site Reliability Engineer in Observability Engineering @Microsoft Azure

Tim Ren

Tim Ren

Partner Group Engineering Manager @Microsoft

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

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.

Mouli Mukherjee

Mouli Mukherjee

Engineering Manager @OpenAI

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

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

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

Abi Aryan

AI Infrastructure Engineer and Educator

Trainings

HALF DAY

Building AI Agents: A Practical Framework for Choosing the Right SDK

Thursday Nov 19 · 09:00AM PST

The AI agent ecosystem has exploded with options—Google's Agent Development Kit, Claude SDK, OpenAI Agents, LangGraph, Pydantic AI, and more emerging monthly. But which one should you actually use?

Training host

Speaker image - Hien Luu

Hien Luu

AI/ML Leader, Advisor, Speaker, and Author

Save your seat
HALF DAY

AI-Assisted Coding Master Class: Build Your Mission Control

Thursday Nov 19 · 01:00PM PST

Most engineers aren't spending enough time setting up their environment to get the most out of their coding agents.

Training host

Speaker image - Sepehr Khosravi

Sepehr Khosravi

Machine Learning Platform Engineer @Coinbase, Award Winning Instructor @UC Berkeley - Gen-AI Bootcamp, Founder @AI Squads

Save your seat

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Explore the schedule

Tracks

12 tracks with 60+ presentations from senior practitioners

AI & ML Security Nov 16

Guardrails & Safety Nets (Evals) for the New Landscape

Discover how teams are building evaluation systems, feedback loops, and safety mechanisms to make AI-powered systems reliable and trustworthy.
Speaker image - Tanya Reilly

Tanya Reilly

Principal Engineer @Datadog, Author of "The Staff Engineer's Path", Likes Going Places on Trains

1 / 5 sessions Explore the track
AI & ML Architecture Nov 18

Architecting for Agents: Beneath the Loop

In this track, we'll work through each layer with practitioners shipping agents in production today, drawing out the lessons that turn a compelling demo into a system you can stake a business on.
Speaker image - Julie Amundson

Julie Amundson

Senior AI Infrastructure Consultant, ex-Googler, ex-Netflixer

2 / 5 sessions Explore the track
AI & ML Platform Engineering Nov 17

Engineering AI Systems

Engineering AI Systems at QCon San Francisco 2026 is for senior engineers and technical leaders building applied AI beyond the prototype stage.
Speaker image - Melanie Zhao

Melanie Zhao

Engineering Lead @BlackRock, Pioneering AI Adoption in Asset Management

3 / 5 sessions Explore the track
AI & ML DevEx & Frontends Nov 16

Modern API Design for Humans and Agents

Sharpen your approach to designing APIs that stand the test of time, focusing on usability, evolvability, and real-world constraints.
Speaker image - Krys Flores

Krys Flores

Staff Software Engineer @Crunchyroll, Host of O'Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Career Roadmap

2 / 5 sessions Explore the track

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.

Hien Luu

QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee Member, Sr. Engineering Manager @Zoox & Author of MLOps with Ray

Conversations that turn insight into impact

QCon for your team

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.

Luca Mezzalira,

Principal Solutions Architect, QCon Speaker, O'Reilly Author, YouTuber

QCon QCon for your team

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

  • Gain concrete strategies from 60+ hand picked speakers across 12 curated tracks.

  • Real-world talks curated for depth, value, without hidden product pitches.

  • Network with peers at Unconferences, in the 'hallway track', during extended breaks, over lunch, and at conference socials.

  • Gain 12 months on-demand access to session recordings after the conference to continue your learning journey.

We've helped thousands of senior software engineers, software architects and tech leaders adopt the right patterns & practices for over 20 years.
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