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Issue: August 2026

London

Boston

San Francisco

New York

Next events Alumni program Certification

Hi folks,

Dio here. The QCon San Francisco 2026 schedule is live, with 76 of the 80 speakers confirmed across 12 tracks.

Smruti Patel, SVP of Engineering @Apollo GraphQL, argued acceleration, autonomy, and accountability as the pillars of a platform team from the QCon San Francisco stage three years ago. In Platform Engineering's Second Act, she covers what AI has changed about what each one demands, and what that does to the platform team's job.

Mallika Rao, Senior Engineering Manager @Zocdoc and previously @Netflix, @Twitter, and @Walmart, makes the case that the challenges teams run into when building agents will look familiar to anyone who has run a recommender system. Andrew Hatch, Engineering Leader and SRE Manager @Cisco ThousandEyes, covers systems drifting toward failure while still looking like they are running fine.

Early bird pricing ends September 8 for all three QCon conferences:

QCon San Francisco (November 16-18, training days November 19-20)
QCon AI New York (December 15-16)
QCon London (April 13-15, 2027, certification workshop April 16).

Group discounts are available at all three conferences. Email info@qconferences.com with your group size, and they will send you a discount code.

QCon AI

QCon AI New York 2026 (December 15-16)

The Program Committee, chaired by Hien Luu, is building the December program around six themes:

AI Use Cases & Industry Transformation. Case studies of AI adoption, AI in FinTech, and how frontier AI companies build products.
AI Engineering & Software Factories. The agentic SDLC, modern AI engineering, deployment pipelines, and harness engineering.
Architecting Agentic Systems. Agentic applications and frameworks, open source agent harnesses, context engineering, and multi-agent systems.
AI Platforms, Models & Data. Enterprise inference, local models, data platforms for agents, knowledge graphs, and model post-training.
Production AI: Reliability, Safety & Operations. Guardrails, evals, observability, security, and scaling inference.
Engineering Leadership & the Future of Work. Building teams in the age of AI, the IC career, Staff+ engineering, and AI adoption within engineering organizations.

Every session comes from a senior practitioner who has run this in production.

See the QCon AI New York program

InfoQ Certifications

ICSAET Certification at QCon London 2027 (April 13-16)

The InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies program returns to QCon London 2027. Attend the three conference days as part of a small cohort of senior engineers and software architects, facilitated by Luca Mezzalira, then complete the capstone workshop on April 16. You’ll leave with the ICSAET certification and a peer group of architects from other companies who worked through the same material with you.

The ICSAET program at QCon London

InfoQ Online Certification Program Cohorts

These online certification cohorts from InfoQ exist for the problem every senior person has. The more senior you get, the fewer people around you can challenge your thinking. Each cohort is a small group of senior engineers and software architects from different companies, with a minimum of five years' experience. Each week you watch a QCon talk, join a four-hour live session, apply the framework to a decision from your own work, and report back what happened. Sessions are never recorded, so the conversations are confidential.

Upcoming online certification cohorts include:

AI Security & Privacy Engineering with Katharine Jarmul, author of Practical Data Privacy (August 26)
Architecture with Luca Mezzalira (September 14)
Engineering Leadership with Michelle Brush (September 18)
AI-Assisted Engineering with Zichuan Xiong and Premanand Chandrasekaran (September 18).

See all cohorts and syllabuses

Hope to see you soon.

Best regards,