Teams & Orgs at QCon San Francisco 2025

As a college sophomore, I founded Pointz, initially building its core routing engine from scratch. I architected the platform’s safety rating algorithm, integrating geospatial data structures, crowdsourced inputs, and multi-criteria decision-making to deliver context-aware routing.

Platform teams frequently inherit systems that were never architected for their current scale, yet are so foundational that downtime can halt the business.

The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business.

Startups are the harshest environments for engineers. Limited time, resources, and energy force teams to make decisions under pressure — and those decisions can determine whether a company survives or stalls.

When many teams work on a large, complex application, the microservice architecture potentially enables them to work independently and deliver a continuous stream of changes.

Since the first compiler, software has been a stack of human-friendly abstractions translated into machine instructions. The engineers who understood at least some of what was going on under the hood were essential—indispensable even. But now?

Once a stock market darling and a pioneering hyperscaler in the 1990s and early 2000s, eBay has been in steady decline since the 2010s. A household name with a flat business, eBay has been unable to make substantive strides in its market reach or its engineering outcomes in the last 15 years.

Climbing into senior engineering leadership isn’t always a matter of following fixed rungs—it can be more like scaling a rugged, ever-shifting mountain. You know there might be a path somewhere on the south face but for some reason the North face has more appeal.

Meta’s internal tools empower the company to operate efficiently, enabling the creation of unique, tailored solutions that fit evolving business needs.

Many engineers reach a point where technical excellence alone isn’t enough to drive meaningful impact or advance their careers. Senior individual contributors must learn to influence without authority, build trust across teams, and navigate challenges like imposter syndrome to truly lead.

Solopreneur & Sustainable Business don't often go together, but that's what can happen when you create something "Good Enough" and hang around "Long Enough". Joe, a true Unicorn in the volatile games business, has survived for 16+ years by creating 19 games in his Clutter Franchise.

While technical competency remains foundational, senior engineering leaders recognize that sustainable competitive advantage stems from organizational capabilities that transcend code quality.

As individual contributors we sharpen our technical chops striving to improve our code and craft. But you may become aware you can do more, and could help others and the team. The path to make that shift isn’t always clear.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to respond to a significant incident? Walk through an hour by hour reconstruction of an incident response or two, focusing on what it was like to be "in the room" and the human response to the incidents.

The AI coding agent landscape evolves weekly. This talk compares today’s frontrunners, shows where each shines, and shares prompts, policies, and “rules templates” that turn code suggestions into production-quality output.

Over the past year, Zoox has invested in integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into internal developer workflows through a company-wide initiative called Zoox Intelligence (ZI).

Netflix runs on a complex multi-layer cloud architecture made up of thousands of services, caches, and databases. As hardware options, workload patterns, cost dynamics and the Netflix products evolve, the cost-optimal hardware and configuration for running our services is constantly changing.

Behind every productivity leap is a rock-solid platform. Go under the hood with Intuit’s GenOS team to see how vector stores, prompt management, RAG pipelines, and agent orchestration come together to serve ~100 million users.

Routine database upgrades should be straightforward, especially with familiar, well-established technology. We were confident heading into our Elasticsearch upgrade, equipped with a solid plan and excited to see performance gains like we had seen from past upgrades.

In this session you'll learn how product leaders turn GenAI enthusiasm into an enterprise-ready blueprint for real productivity gains.

In an increasingly competitive field, software expertise alone may not be enough to stand out and drive your career forward.

In January of 2023, the Microsoft Azure Wide Area Network experienced a global outage. If you were a Microsoft customer at the time, you were impacted by this outage.

As AI accelerates delivery, new attack surfaces and compliance risks emerge. This session distills best practices for threat-modeling AI pipelines, guarding sensitive data, detecting prompt-injection, and validating AI-generated code before it merges.