Hi folks,

Our Program Committee has chosen the 12 tracks for QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-18) and the Track Hosts for each one across the three conference days. Speakers are being added each week, and all 14 training sessions for November 19-20 are published.

This email has everything you need in one place:

• The tracks

• The speakers

• Ticket pricing

• Manager approval templates

Share it with your team.

At a glance

• Conference: November 16-18, 2026.

• Optional training and certification days: November 19-20.

• Venue: Hyatt Regency San Francisco, on the Embarcadero waterfront, hotel and venue in one building.

• 60+ senior practitioners across 12 tracks. Sessions are chosen by the practitioners who host them, with no hidden product pitches.

• $2,595 for the 3-day pass if you register before July 14. 12 months of on-demand recordings included.

• Register at qconsf.com/registration.

Program schedule

Each track is a full day of five talks on a single theme, chosen and hosted by a senior practitioner who works in that area. Here's how the tracks map to the conference days:

Monday, November 16

• Architectures You've Always Wondered About, hosted by Daniela Miao, Co-Founder & CTO @Momento

• Guardrails & Safety Nets (Evals) for the New Landscape, hosted by Tanya Reilly, Principal Engineer @Datadog, Author of "The Staff Engineer's Path"

• Modern API Design for Humans and Agents, hosted by Krys Flores, Staff Software Engineer @Crunchyroll

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

Tuesday, November 17

• Something About Distributed Systems, hosted by Vidhya Arvind, Tech Lead & Founding Architect for the Data Abstraction Platform @Netflix

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

• Engineering AI Systems, hosted by Melanie Zhao, Engineering Lead @BlackRock

• Data Platforms Reimagined, hosted by Adi Polak, Director, Advocacy and Developer Experience Engineering @Confluent

Wednesday, November 18

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

• Code Beyond Engineers & Engineering Teams, hosted by Suhail Patel, Principal Engineer @Monzo

• Real World Platform Engineering, hosted by Daniel Bryant, Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture"

• Engineering the Developer Experience, hosted by Ankit Jain, Co-Founder & CEO @Aviator

Each conference day includes unconference sessions, where you work through your own problems with peers, speakers, and track hosts.

You can also browse the current sessions by topic. Every topic area has its own page with a downloadable PDF of the published talks, updated automatically as sessions are added:

• AI & ML

• Architecture

• Platform Engineering

• Teams & Orgs

• Observability & SRE

• DevEx & Frontends

• Modern Languages & Infrastructure

• Cloud

• Security

Session spotlights

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
You can shard a database on day one. Moving gigabytes of state between live nodes without dropping keys or blocking the main event loop is the part that hurts. Jacob walks through how Valkey built atomic slot migration.

APIs That Can't Afford to Be Wrong: Lessons from Moving Money
Fawziyah Alebiosu, Software Engineer @Imprint
Retries are cheap, right up until your API moves money. Card networks give you three seconds to authorize or decline, with no single source of truth to fall back on. Fawziyah covers designing APIs where a wrong answer costs real dollars.

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
You can ship an AI prototype in an afternoon by calling a foundation-model API. Knowing whether it still works when real users and messy data arrive is the hard part. Hamel makes the case for evals, traces, and metrics as the base layer of reliable AI.

Progressive Failure Modes of Modern AI Serving Systems
Abi Aryan, AI Infrastructure Engineer and Educator
Your inference platform fails in layers, and watching model quality alone won't catch it. Abi maps how production AI serving systems degrade and the systems engineering that keeps them running.

Understanding as a Deliverable: How AI Changes What Healthy Software Looks Like
Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science @University of Victoria, Co-Creator of the SPACE Framework
AI is changing how your team writes software faster than your engineering practices can adapt. Margaret-Anne examines what healthy software looks like when more of it is generated than written.

See the latest sessions on the tracks page. Click any track card to see the overview and confirmed sessions.

Optional training days, November 19-20

14 hands-on training sessions run over the two days after the conference. Add them to a conference pass or attend standalone. Three of them:

• Building AI Agents: A Practical Framework for Choosing the Right SDK with Hien Luu, an AI/ML leader and author of MLOps with Ray. Build the same production agent three ways and leave with a decision matrix for choosing an SDK for your own stack. (Thursday, half day)

• The Incident Lab: Responding to and Learning From Production Failures with Courtney Nash, a researcher on system safety and failure in complex systems. A full day built around one real incident examined from the inside, then a structured review that gets past surface-level root cause. (Friday, full day)

• Effective AI-Native Development with Harness Engineering with Zichuan Xiong and Premanand Chandrasekaran, Heads of AIOps and Technology at Thoughtworks. Six hands-on hours adding features to a legacy codebase with a coding agent while a live dashboard tracks coverage and code health. (Friday, full day)

Pick your specific sessions when the full program publishes in September. Class sizes are small, and seats are first come, first served. Training is fully refundable until September 21, so booking early to hold a place carries no risk. See all trainings.

The cohort experience with Luca Mezzalira

The InfoQ Certified Architect Program runs across all four days. It's a small cohort of senior engineers and architects, all with a minimum of five years' experience, from different companies and industries, working through the conference as a group with facilitator Luca Mezzalira.

You meet your cohort in a private Slack group beforehand, start each day with a cohort breakfast, and share a dedicated lunch mid-week. The Thursday workshop with Luca brings everything from the conference together. You leave with a network of senior practitioners you can call when you're weighing a decision, and the InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies certification.

Already have a conference pass? Add the cohort certification from your account page.

Bringing your team?

Teams get the most out of QCon by splitting across tracks, comparing notes at the unconferences and evening socials, then leaving with a shared view on which decisions are worth making. QCon attendees are senior software practitioners. 34% of attendees are software architects or technical leads, and another 23% are senior and lead engineers. For a team, that means checking your own decisions against those of people solving the same problems at other companies, which is hard to find elsewhere.

Group discounts apply per conference ticket for teams from the same company:

• 3-6 attendees save up to $100 per ticket

• 7-10 attendees save up to $150 per ticket

• 11-15 attendees save up to $175 per ticket

• 16+ attendees save up to $200 per ticket

Email info@qconsf.com with your group size for a code. Discounts can't be combined or applied retroactively, so request the code before anyone registers. More on the teams page.

Been to QCon before? Returning attendees can claim an alumni discount. Email info@qconsf.com with your alumni name.

Can't get the whole team to San Francisco? The Video-Only Pass gives each person 12 months of on-demand access, with recordings from December 21.

Pricing and procurement

The 3-day pass is $2,595 until July 14. It increases to $2,715 the next day. Registering before July 14 saves $120 now and $655 against the final price. Payment by invoice on NET 30 terms is available online until October 19, and the price is set by the date payment is received, not the order date.

Plans change. If someone can't make it, you can transfer their ticket to a colleague for free up to November 13, and every in-person ticket comes with 12 months of on-demand access to the sessions.

Need sign-off? The manager approval templates are pre-written and ready to send. Register.

Venue, hotel, and the city

The Hyatt Regency is both venue and hotel, right on the Embarcadero waterfront. Book a room at the QCon rate on the venue page.

The city is on the doorstep, whether you're planning a team day or staying for the weekend:

• Walk or bike the Embarcadero, south to the ballpark or north to Fisherman's Wharf

• The Ferry Building opposite for food stalls and a farmers market

• Pier 33 ferries to Alcatraz (tickets sell out well ahead, so book before you fly in)

• The Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, and the cable cars

• Muir Woods, Sausalito, or the Napa and Sonoma wineries, a short drive north

The San Francisco visitor's guide has itineraries and maps to help you make the most of your time in the city.

Current pricing ends Tuesday, July 14. Secure your place.

See you in San Francisco

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