Hi folks,

Registration is open for the new InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program, facilitated by Hien Luu, author of MLOps with Ray and Beginning Apache Spark 3. It joins the InfoQ Certified Architect Program with Luca Mezzalira, and a new cohort with Manuel Pais (co-author of Team Topologies and former InfoQ editor) is coming soon.

On the conference side, QCon AI Boston is three weeks away, and QCon San Francisco has just confirmed its first track hosts for November.

InfoQ Online Cohorts - New AI Engineering Program is open

The harder decisions in senior engineering rarely come with a clear right answer. The InfoQ Online Certification Programs give you a confidential cohort to pressure-test those decisions before you commit to anything at work.

Four hours a week over five weeks, you bring real decisions from your own context into a session with senior practitioners from different companies, industries, and contexts who challenge your reasoning. 

Upcoming cohorts

InfoQ Certified Architect Program - June 10

Facilitated by Luca Mezzalira, this cohort covers resilience patterns, decentralized decision-making, platform engineering, AI agents, and the role of AI in architecture work. You leave with five frameworks applied to five concrete problems from your own work and a capstone article developed across the cohort, with the strongest published on InfoQ.com. 

Next cohort starts June 10. Reserve your place.

New: InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program - July 25

Facilitated by Hien Luu, the AI Engineering program covers RAG and context pipelines, agent design, AI platform architecture, evaluation, and operational reliability. For many teams, these decisions are being made for the first time. The cohort gives you a place to examine those calls with peers before the architecture becomes expensive to unwind. 

View the syllabus. Next cohort starts July 25. Reserve your place.

Coming soon: a new cohort with Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies and former InfoQ editor. The cohort focuses on team cognitive load, organizational design for fast flow, and the structural decisions that shape how engineering work gets done. Check the InfoQ Certified Program website for updates.

Most companies reimburse for professional development. Use the "Convince Your Boss" template to make the case.

QCon AI Boston 2026, June 1-2 - Last few weeks to secure your place

QCon AI Boston 2026 focuses on the engineering side of production AI: evaluation, agent infrastructure, cost predictability, latency at scale, and the trade-offs that don't show up in the demo.

There are just a few weeks left to secure your spot and join peers from Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, IBM, Klaviyo, Mastercard, Fidelity Investments, Cisco, Worldpay, and ExxonMobil. The conference is close to selling out, so this is the right time to register if you’re planning to attend.

Highlights from the schedule featuring 35+ senior software practitioners include:

• Martin Spier, ChatGPT Performance @OpenAI, on why AI application latency is not just a GPU problem. The slow path runs through client work, CPU orchestration, context assembly, routing, inference, and streaming.

• Ajay Prakash, Senior Staff Software Engineer @LinkedIn, on how LinkedIn built an organizational context layer for AI agents with MCP, helping agents work across internal services, frameworks, data systems, and company-specific workflows.

• Siddharth Kodwani and Swaroop Chitlur from DoorDash, on building shared GenAI platform infrastructure for retry logic, fallback handling, cost tracking, prompt versioning, batch processing, and the plumbing teams need before AI applications can scale.

Explore the full schedule.

QCon AI Boston 2026 also includes dedicated social events and peer-sharing spaces for senior engineers and architects working through similar production AI challenges.

Attending with your team? Groups of three or more qualify for additional savings. Email info@boston.qcon.ai with your group size. 

Register for QCon AI Boston 2026.

QCon San Francisco 2026, November 16-20 - First hosts confirmed

The 2026 conference tracks cover AI, architecture, distributed systems, platform engineering, resilience, API design, data platforms, and Staff+ work. 

Early track hosts for 2026 confirmed include:

• Architecting for Agents: Beneath the Loop with Julie Amundson, Senior AI Infrastructure Consultant, ex-Googler, ex-Netflixer

• Staff+ Engineering Skills with Javier Fernandez-Ivern, Staff Software Engineer @Netflix

• Real World Platform Engineering with Daniel Bryant, Platform Engineer and Co-Author of Mastering API Architecture

• Resilience Engineering: Everything Fails All the Time with Vanessa Huerta Granda, Resilience Engineering Manager @Enova

• Engineering AI Systems with Melanie Zhao, Engineering Lead @BlackRock

Attending with your team? Groups of three or more qualify for additional savings. Email info@qconsf.com with your group size.

Early bird pricing ends June 9th.

Register for QCon San Francisco 2026

I look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming programs or events.