Track host
About the track
Learn how engineering organizations are building internal platforms that deliver real outcomes: faster delivery, safer operations, and reduced developer cognitive load. This track explores the architectural, organizational, and operational trade-offs behind successful platform engineering initiatives, including balancing standardization with flexibility at scale.
Sessions in this track
Wednesday 18 November. 5 sessions per track, chosen and introduced by the Track Host.
10:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Platform Engineering Platform Engineering’s Second Act: From Vending Machine to Passport Control Smruti Patel, Alex Mann Three years ago on the QCon SF stage, I made the case for “Acceleration, Autonomy, and Accountability” as the pillars of a successful platform. Those pillars haven't moved. AI has just rewritten what each one requires, and the platform team's job along with it. 11:45 Pacific DEKJ Session Beyond the Kubernetes API: Building LinkedIn’s Compute Platform Ronak Nathani Principal Staff Software Engineer, Compute Infra @LinkedIn, Podcast Host @Software Misadventures LinkedIn’s Kubernetes-based compute platform spans more than 500k bare-metal machines, 5M pods, with thousands of developers doing more than 110k deploys a week. We don’t expose raw Kubernetes to developers and instead, provide a curated set of platform offerings. 13:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Observability: The Missing Control Plane for Agentic Engineering Rachael Wonnacott Machine learning and Applied AI Engineering As AI agents move from generating code to testing, deploying, and operating it, the important question is no longer “How autonomous is the agent?” It’s “What can this agent safely decide without a human?”… 14:45 Pacific DEKJ Session 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 We have all seen the moment: the platform goes live, the launch deck looks sharp, the portal is polished, the golden paths are documented, and yet teams quietly continue doing things the old way. Not always because the platform is bad, but because adoption was assumed, not owned. 15:55 Pacific DEKJ Session Platform Engineering Building a Migration Platform: Moving 100+ Netflix RDBMS Workloads to Aurora PostgreSQL Ammar Khaku, Kshitij Gupta In late 2024, Netflix made a bet: consolidate the vast majority of our relational database use cases onto a single engine: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.$2,955, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends October 13th. All pass options.
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.