Abstract
Register
$2,955, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends October 13th. All pass options.
76%
senior dev or higher
1:11
speaker ratio
60+
practitioners
QCon San Francisco 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Engineering AI Systems Hosted by Melanie Zhao Engineering Lead @BlackRock, Pioneering AI Adoption in Asset ManagementFrom the same track
Tuesday 17 November
10:35 Ballroom A Session Inference Progressive Failure Modes of Modern AI Serving Systems Abi Aryan AI Infrastructure Engineer and Educator 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. 11:45 Ballroom A Session AI The Revenge of the Data Scientist: Why Reliable AI Needs Evals, Traces, and Metrics Hamel Husain Machine Learning Engineer, 20+ Years in Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science 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. 13:35 Ballroom A Session AI/ML Skills, Memory, or Fine-Tuning? The Engineering Loop Behind Self-Improving Agents Abhinav Sinha CEO @Lucidic AI, Previously @Stanford AI Lab, @Citadel and Susquehanna International Group, and @Apple 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. 14:45 Ballroom A Session AI/ML Lessons from Building a $100M Product in Six Weeks at OpenAI Brian Yang Member of Technical Staff @OpenAI Engineering is shifting from synchronous, line-by-line implementation to an asynchronous model in which agents execute, verify, and retry while humans own intent, architecture, constraints, and release decisions. 15:55 Ballroom A Session Inside AIROS: BlackRock’s Platform Architecture for Applied AI at Scale Dan Wolf Head of Platform Engineering for PMG Tech @BlackRock BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group is transforming how investment teams conduct research by combining deep investment expertise with shared AI capabilities. AIROS, the AI Research Operating System, is the platform architecture behind that transformation. 17:05 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Engineering AI Systems