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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Principal Site Reliability Engineer in Observability Engineering @Microsoft Azure
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
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
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
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
Building AI Agents: A Practical Framework for Choosing the Right SDK
Thursday Nov 19 · 09:00AM PST
Training host
Hien Luu
AI/ML Leader, Advisor, Speaker, and Author
AI-Assisted Coding Master Class: Build Your Mission Control
Thursday Nov 19 · 01:00PM PST
Training host
Sepehr Khosravi
Machine Learning Platform Engineer @Coinbase, Award Winning Instructor @UC Berkeley - Gen-AI Bootcamp, Founder @AI Squads
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Explore the scheduleTracks
12 tracks with 60+ presentations from senior practitioners
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
Architecting for Agents: Beneath the Loop
Julie Amundson
Senior AI Infrastructure Consultant, ex-Googler, ex-Netflixer
Engineering AI Systems
Melanie Zhao
Engineering Lead @BlackRock, Pioneering AI Adoption in Asset Management
Modern API Design for Humans and Agents
Krys Flores
Staff Software Engineer @Crunchyroll, Host of O'Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Career Roadmap
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 60+ hand picked speakers across 12 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.