Engineering talks on software at scale.
Browse the QCon San Francisco sessions. Senior practitioners share hard-won lessons from building, operating, and evolving complex systems.
Senior engineers from these companies attend QCon to stay ahead.
QCon San Francisco 2026 Sessions
Browse Confirmed Talks and Keynotes (More to Come)
Notes From 300 Installs Inside Someone Else's Cloud
Adam Hicks
Senior Solutions Architect @Groundcover
The Harness Is the New Operating System
Manju Rajashekhar
Founder & CEO @Mad Labs, Entrepreneur, Engineering Executive, Founder, Investor
APIs That Can't Afford to Be Wrong: Lessons from Moving Money
Fawziyah Alebiosu
Software Engineer @Imprint
Live Resharding Without Regret: Lessons from Building Valkey's Atomic Slot Migration
Jacob Murphy
Open Source Maintainer @Valkey & Software Engineer @Google Cloud's Memorystore Team
The Freeze Paradox: Why Stopping Deployments Doesn't Stop Failures
Prachi Jain
Senior Site Reliability Engineer @Netflix, Expert in Building and Managing Scalable, Reliable Services, Previously @Fastly and @Cisco
Sandhya Narayan
Technical Program Manager @Netflix, Expert in Information Security, Compliance, and Risk Management, Previously @Adobe, SAP, @eBay, and the Stanford Research Institute
Adapt or Drift: Resilience Engineering When AI Moves the Operating Point
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
Everything I Knew About Developer Experience Is Wrong for Agents
Emmanuel Paraskakis
Founder & CEO @Level 250
How Airbnb Guardrailed Its AI Customer Support Agent
Weiping Peng
Distinguished Engineer @Airbnb, Previously Principal Architect @Salesforce for AI platform
How to Build a Real-Time Voice Agent
Rishabh Bhargava
Director of ML @Together AI
LLM Flip-Flops: From Reliability Risk to a Hill-Climbing Signal
Dianhuan Lin
Staff Engineer @Datadog
The Schema Was Never Enough: The World in Protocols
Ryan Scott Brown
Principal Engineer @Crunchyroll, Previously @Red Hat, @Trek10, and @Vendia
Inside the Disaggregated Architecture Serving LLM Inference
Nancy Zheng
VP of Engineering of AI Inference @Cerebras
No New Backend: The API Layer Behind 800+ Agent-Built Apps at Duolingo
Sarah Deitke
Senior Software Engineer @Duolingo
Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale
Lorin Hochstein
Staff Software Engineer @Airbnb, Writes @surfingcomplexity.blog, Previously @Netflix and Member of the Resilience in Software Foundation
Practical Concerns Running Agents in Production
Amanda Walker
Sr. Director, Engineering - Privacy, Safety and Security @Google
What Is Incident Severity, but a Lie Agreed Upon?
Em Ruppe
Technical Incident Commander @Chime, Previously @SendGrid and @Twilio, and Product and Training @Jeli.io
It's Never the Thing That Broke: Learning From Incidents at (AI) Speed
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
Stop Fighting the Remodel: API Design for Models That Outgrew Their Boundaries
Aarti Gupta
Staff Engineer @Netflix
Learning Out Loud (Under Near-Existential Pressure)
Laura Savino
Software Engineer @Adobe Photoshop, Human Language Enthusiast and Former Language Teacher, 15 Years of Software Development
Breaking Down the Walls to Python & Big Data + AI Performance with Transpilation and LLMs
Holden Karau
Data Engineer @Snowflake & Co-Founder of Fight Health Insurance, Previously @Netfilx, @Apple, and @Google
Nobody Knows Everything (and That's OK): Building Alignment in Complex, Rapidly Changing Environments
Kaye Mason
Senior Staff Software Engineer @Meta, Previously @Google and @EA, 20+ Years in Real-Time Rendering, Spatial Computing, and Developer Platforms
Orderly Keys, Wild Values: Adaptive Compression for Distributed Key-Value Storage
Joseph Lynch
Principal Software Engineer @Netflix Building Highly-Reliable and High-Leverage Infrastructure Across Stateless and Stateful Services
Ayushi Singh
Senior Software Engineer @Netflix Specializing in Large-Scale Distributed Data Systems
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
Building a Data Platform with AI
Mouli Mukherjee
Engineering Manager @OpenAI
How to Build Online Systems with Object Storage
Almog Gavra
Co-Founder @Responsive.dev - Building Object-Native Databases, Previously @Confluent and @LinkedIn
Inside Asimov: BlackRock’s Platform Architecture for Applied AI at Scale
Dan Wolf
Head of Platform Engineering for PMG Tech @BlackRock
Sri Annapurna Bhupatiraju
Director and Principal Engineer @BlackRock, One of the Founding Members of BlackRock AI Labs
Use AI to Multiply Your Team as a Staff Engineer
Jordan Cutler
Senior Staff Engineer and Web Tech Lead @Pinterest, Author of High Growth Engineer Newsletter
Autoscaling 800 Valkey Clusters: Distributed Systems Lessons from Scaling Stateful Fleets
Kishor Yadav Kommanaboina
Staff Software Engineer @Snapchat - Leading Caching and Storage Infrastructure
One Does Not Simply Add Synchronous Writes - Bridging Batch and Real Time with Apache Iceberg
Paige Elinson
Staff Software Engineer @Datadog
Scaling Tech by Aligning Humans
Scott Behrens
Principal Security Engineer @Netflix, Providing GenAI Technical Leadership and Upleveling Engineers on The Engineer Setlist Blog
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
Lessons from Building a $100M Product in Six Weeks at OpenAI
Brian Yang
Member of Technical Staff @OpenAI
Transitioning From a Startup to a Mature Platform
Joy Ebertz
Principal Engineer @Imprint, Blogger, and Speaker, Previously @Harness, @Split, & @Box
Trust, but Verify: Delivering Quality with Agentic Workflows
Adrian Hatch
Solutions Engineer @Antithesis
Bridging Retrieval and Ranking: From LLM Embeddings and Graph Features to a GPU-Served DLRM
Sudarshan Srinivasa Ramanujam
Lead Engineer @LinkedIn - Working on Feed Ranking & Retrieval Modeling
Learning What’s Already There: A Breadth-Based Approach To Onboarding
Laura de Vesine
Senior Staff Engineer @Reddit
When Your Users Are Agents: Lessons from a Distributed Postgres Platform
Gwen Shapira
Co-Founder and CPO @Nile, Previously Engineering Leader @Confluent, PMC Member @Kafka, & Committer Apache Sqoop
Adaptive Systems in Production: What Recommendation Systems Can Teach Us About Agents
Mallika Rao
Senior Engineering Manager @Zocdoc, Previously @Netflix, @Twitter and @Walmart
Failing in Layers: Lessons from Rebuilding Netflix's ML Serving Platform
Rajat Shah
Staff Software Engineer @Netflix
Wenbing Bai
Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform Team @Netflix
The Execution Muscle: Why Great Teams Are Built, Not Hired
Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg
Co-founder of @Bravely, Business Psychologist, Executive Coach, Trainer, Speaker, 12+ Years Experience Enabling High Performing Teams and Leaders
Features vs Futures
Kent Beck
Original Signer of the Agile Manifesto, Author of the Extreme Programming Book Series, Rediscoverer of Test-Driven Development
Builder-Driven Development
Jyothi Nookula
Product Leader Director with 13+ Years Driving AI Product & Platform Innovation, Previously @Meta, @Amazon, and @Etsy
How Netflix Retrofitted Its SDLC for AI Coding Agents
Mark Khuzam
Senior Software Engineer @Netflix, Previously Led the Consumer Web Platform Team @OpenTable
Platform Engineering’s Second Act: From Vending Machine to Passport Control
Smruti Patel
SVP of Engineering @apollographql
Alex Mann
Senior Engineering Manager @apollographql
Beyond the Kubernetes API: Building LinkedIn’s Compute Platform
Ronak Nathani
Principal Staff Software Engineer, Compute Infra @LinkedIn, Podcast Host @Software Misadventures
Legacy as Leverage: How Brownfield Work Builds Technical Judgment
Shine Garg
Founder of Uncharted Path Breakthrough, Former Staff Software Engineer, 15+ Years Building and Scaling Backend, Data, Machine Learning, and Platform Systems
Making Production Legible to Agents: Lessons From Building an Observability MCP
Liz Fong-Jones
Technical Fellow @honeycomb.io, Developer Advocate, Labor and Ethics Organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Over Two Decades of Experience
No More Small Systems, How AI May Bring Large System Problems to Everyone
Adam Bender
Technical Lead for Enterprise Engineering @Google
Efficient GPU Agents: Infra for Autonomous LLM Perf Optimization
Ben Segal
Software Engineer @Parasail
Growing Engineers in the Era of Agentic Coding
Adam Berry
Staff Engineer @Netflix
Observability: The Missing Control Plane for Agentic Engineering
Rachael Wonnacott
Machine learning and Applied AI Engineering
The Death of the Code Review
Laurie Voss
Head of Developer Relations @Arize AI, Co-Founder of npm, Inc., Developer for 30+ Years
Dreams on Paper: How Agents Learn from Experience
Brian Douglas
Co-Founder & CEO @Paper Compute Co., Previously Founded Open Sauced and Led Developer Advocacy @GitHub
Shipping Faster, Understanding Less
Margaret-Anne Storey
Professor of Computer Science @University of Victoria, Co-Creator of the SPACE Framework and the Triple Debt Model for Software Health, a Canada Research Chair in Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering
Why Most Platform Teams Fail: The Adoption Problem Nobody Wants to Own
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
You Can't Read the Code Anymore - Verifying Software in the Age of AI
Omer van Kloeten
Principal Engineer @Forter, 25+ Years in Software Engineering, Now Building an AI-Agent Framework to Tame Legacy Systems and Reduce KTLO
Avoiding Prompt Debt: Building Resiliant AI Apps that Grow With the Ecosystem
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
Building a Migration Platform: Moving 100+ Netflix RDBMS Workloads to Aurora PostgreSQL
Ammar Khaku
Distributed Systems Engineer @Netflix with an Affinity for Online Data Stores
Kshitij Gupta
Software Engineer @Netflix, Building Databases and Distributed Systems
The Diary of an AI Adopter: How I Went From Skeptical to Enthusiastic in Our Organization’s AI Migration Efforts
Tara Hernandez
Vice President @MongoDB & Lecturer at the UC Santa Cruz Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development
When Everyone Can Code, Who Owns Production?
Sanjay Singh
Staff Software Engineer @LinkedIn Specializing in Large-Scale Distributed Systems, Traffic Infrastructure, Reliability, and Zero Trust Security
Game Time: How to (Unsuccessfully) 10x in a Week & (Successfully) 10x in a Year
Plum Ertz
Senior Director, Engineering @Ro, Specializing in Digital Accessibility, UI Development, and Scaling Systems and Teams