Architecture at QCon San Francisco 2026
At QCon San Francisco 2026, discover the emerging trends trends and practices in Architecture directly from the senior practitioners who are defending what's next.
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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Architecture sessions at QCon San Francisco 2026
Breaking down the walls to Python & Big Data + AI Performance with Transpilation and LLMs
Many of us have a love hate relationship with Apache Spark, especially when it comes to PySpark. Especially in Python, the UDF performance can be a dumpster fire.
Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale
Even in the ethereal world of software, everything has a limit. And, once that limit is reached, very bad things can happen. In this talk, we will explore the problem of saturation: when a software system runs into one of these limits.
Lorin Hochstein
Staff Software Engineer @Airbnb, Writes @surfingcomplexity.blog, Previously @Netflix and Member of the Resilience in Software Foundation
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
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
How to Build a Real-Time Voice Agent
A voice agent looks like a chatbot with a microphone.
Architecting Nubank's Global Financial Infrastructure
Instant payment frameworks are transforming global finance, but few institutions have faced the infrastructure scale required by Brazil's Pix network.
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
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Explore the scheduleTracks
12 tracks with 60+ presentations from senior practitioners
Architecting for Agents: Beneath the Loop
Julie Amundson
Senior AI Infrastructure Consultant, ex-Googler, ex-Netflixer
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Daniela Miao
Co-Founder & CTO @Momento, Systems & Observability Nerd, ex-Lightstep, ex-DynamoDB
Distributed Systems in Production
Vidhya Arvind
Tech Lead & a Founding Architect for the Data Abstraction Platform @Netflix, Previously @Box and @Verizon
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"
QCon is where you discover what’s next, from the senior practitioners building it. We focus on emerging patterns proven in production, sharing the unfiltered story: the real-world trade-offs, the hard-won lessons, and what it actually took to ship.
President, C4Media (makers of InfoQ and QCon)
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.
We've helped thousands of senior software engineers, software architects and tech leaders adopt the right patterns & practices for over 20 years.
