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

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

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

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

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

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?

TRAINING HOST
Speaker image - Hien Luu

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.

TRAINING HOST
Speaker image - Sepehr Khosravi

Sepehr Khosravi

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

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Explore the schedule

What you’ll learn

Real-world patterns from senior developers at the leading edge

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Systems you’ve heard about but never fully understood. Deep dives into real architectures, trade-offs, and the decisions that shaped them.
Speaker image - Daniela Miao

Daniela Miao

Co-Founder & CTO @Momento, Systems & Observability Nerd, ex-Lightstep, ex-DynamoDB

Nov 16

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

Nov 18

Something About Distributed Systems

In this track you’ll hear from engineers and architects who are living with distributed systems every day—shipping features, firefighting incidents, and pushing the limits of scale.
Speaker image - Vidhya Arvind

Vidhya Arvind

Tech Lead & a Founding Architect for the Data Abstraction Platform @Netflix, Previously @Box and @Verizon

Nov 17

Staff+ Engineering Skills

This track asks: as a Staff+ IC, what are you doing to help your org navigate change — and how are you setting up colleagues and partner teams to navigate the next one?
Speaker image - Javier Fernandez-Ivern

Javier Fernandez-Ivern

Staff Software Engineer @Netflix with Over 24 Years in Software Engineering

Nov 17

Code Beyond Engineers & Engineering Teams

Learn how coding is expanding beyond traditional engineers, into product, operations, and AI-assisted roles, and what this means for teams and systems.
Speaker image - Suhail Patel

Suhail Patel

Principal Engineer @Monzo Focused on Designing and Operating Distributed Systems, Previously @Citymapper

Nov 18

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

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

Nov 16

Real World Platform Engineering

This track explores the architectural, organizational, and operational trade-offs behind successful platform engineering initiatives, including balancing standardization with flexibility at scale.
Speaker image - Daniel Bryant

Daniel Bryant

Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News Manager

Nov 18

Engineering the Developer Experience

This track is designed for engineering leaders, senior engineers, and architects who are responsible for how their organizations build software.
Speaker image - Ankit Jain

Ankit Jain

Co-Founder & CEO @Aviator

Nov 18

Resilience Engineering: Everything Fails All the Time

Learn how to design systems that expect failure, adapt to it, and continue operating under stress.
Speaker image - Vanessa Huerta Granda

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

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

Nov 17

Data Platforms Reimagined

Examine how modern data platforms are evolving to support real-time, AI-driven, and decentralized use cases, redefining how data flows through organizations.
Speaker image - Adi Polak

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.

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 75+ hand picked speakers across 15 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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