Hi folks,

QCon AI Boston 2026, held last week, focused on running AI in production. The talks covered agents, context engineering, evals, MCP, inference, security, and adoption. AI has moved past the demo. The work now is building AI systems that teams can operate, trust, secure, and measure once real users and messy data show up.

That's what makes reliable AI a systems problem. The teams making progress are setting clear agent boundaries, grounding systems in the right context, treating evals and traces as production infrastructure, and building security into the tool layer instead of relying on prompts. What stuck with people was the honesty about it. Speakers talked about what broke, what held up, what they changed, and which patterns are starting to hold.

This is happening alongside the rest of the work, not instead of it, for everyone doing senior engineering. Distributed systems still have to be designed, platforms still have to be run, and teams still need someone to lead them, now with AI somewhere in the picture.

That mix is what the next QCons are built around. AI runs through the whole program, but it isn't the only thing on it. QCon San Francisco 2026 has confirmed all 12 tracks and published early sessions. Registration for QCon London 2027 is open. And the InfoQ Online Certification Programs give senior engineers a peer group for the decisions teams face now, across the sociotechnical side of architecture, architecting for flow, and the architecture trade-offs that come with putting AI into production systems.

QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-18) - Track hosts and first sessions confirmed

All 12 tracks and Track Hosts for the 2026 conference are confirmed. Thomas Betts, QCon San Francisco 2026 Program Committee Member and Senior Laureate Software Architect @Blackbaud, describes the thinking behind the program: "AI is everywhere this year, and the deliberate choice was not to let it be the only subject. It touches all the topics. Some talks lead with AI. In others, it's an undercurrent, where the work is still software engineering, software architecture, and leading engineering teams, now with AI happening all around."

The first confirmed sessions are in the Engineering AI Systems track, hosted by Melanie Zhao, Engineering Lead @BlackRock.

The Revenge of the Data Scientist: Why Reliable AI Needs Evals, Traces, and Metrics
Hamel Husain, Machine Learning Engineer, 20+ Years in Applied AI
Getting the prototype working is one problem. Knowing whether your AI system holds up once real users and messy data arrive is another. Hamel walks through building evals, reading traces, and using metrics to tell whether the system is working in production.

Progressive Failure Modes of Modern AI Serving Systems
Abi Aryan, AI Infrastructure Engineer and Educator
Inference platforms don't fail all at once. They fail in layers. Abi goes through what those layers look like and the systems engineering that keeps AI workloads serving reliably under load.

Some of the best conversations at QCon happen between the sessions. The day starts with breakfast, the breaks are long enough to actually talk through a session over coffee instead of rushing to the next room, and the unconferences let people set their own agenda and dig into whatever they came with. With one speaker for every 11 attendees, the people who gave the talks are around and easy to catch. When you're senior, the people who can give you a useful read on a decision usually aren't in your own company, and a couple of days of these conversations is hard to get any other way.

Current pricing ends July 14th. 

Register now to save $120.

QCon London 2027 (April 13-16) - Registration open

Registration is open for QCon London 2027 at the QEII Centre. The conference runs April 13-15, with a training day on the 16th.

15 provisional tracks have been announced, including Engineering AI Systems, Architecting for Agents, Staff+ Engineering Skills, Resilience Engineering, and Real World Platform Engineering.

Tickets are at their lowest price now. Current pricing ends July 14th.

For groups of 10 or more, launch discounts are available. Email info@qconlondon.com with your group size for a discount code.

Explore the conference

InfoQ Online Certification Programs - Sociotechnical Architecture, Flow Architect, and AI Engineering

These cohorts run online, four hours a week over five weeks, with a small cohort of senior engineers and software architects, all from different companies. Each week, you take a framework or pattern from a QCon talk and apply it to a real decision you're working through.

• InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies covers the trade-offs that define senior architecture work, including the sociotechnical side of the role. Facilitated by Luca Mezzalira, Principal Solutions Architect.

• InfoQ Certified Organizational Architect is about architecting for flow: team structure, platform strategy, and how value moves through an organization. Starts June 19, facilitated by Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies.

• InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program is about taking AI systems from prototype to production: RAG and retrieval, agent boundaries, platform, and evals. Starts July 25, facilitated by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager and author of MLOps with Ray.

If you have questions about any of these, just reply to this email.

Best,