International Software Development Conference and Training Days on November 16-20, 2026 in San Francisco, United States

The gap between emerging technology and proven implementation is where most teams lose months. What's experimental today becomes table stakes faster than most engineering organizations can track. The architectural decisions you make now shape your systems for years.

The fastest path to clarity is learning directly from senior practitioners who've already navigated these trade-offs. Not vendor pitches. Not keynotes built around products. Peer-to-peer knowledge from engineers who've built, shipped, and scaled.

QCon San Francisco 2026 brings that concentrated access together in one place. From November 16-18, 60+ senior practitioners share what's working and what isn't, across AI engineering, architecture, platform engineering, and software leadership. Followed by two days of optional hands-on training, November 19-20.

Every session is hand-selected by a program committee of senior practitioners based on real production experience, not sponsorships. The mini-conference format means each track goes deep: no broad surveys, no introductory content, no marketing fluff.

Speakers are senior engineers, architects, and tech leads who are building and scaling these systems right now, not consultants or academics theorizing about what might work.

Beyond the sessions, unconference formats create space for honest peer conversations about the challenges you're actually facing. These are the connections that extend well beyond three days in San Francisco.

QCon San Francisco 2026 marks 20 years of practitioner-curated conferences, built on one principle: the fastest way to validate your technical direction is to hear from engineers who have already navigated similar decisions at scale. The signals you pick up compound quickly, helping you cut months of experimentation and make better architectural calls before they become expensive to reverse.

What You'll Experience at QCon San Francisco 2026

- Focused sessions on AI engineering, resilient architectures, platform engineering, and more, led by practitioners who are solving these problems in production right now.

- Practitioner-driven content: no marketing fluff, no sales pitches, just real-world implementation patterns.

- Peer-validated approaches from engineers who have navigated similar trade-offs, with real implementation patterns you can bring back to your team.

- Unconference sessions and social events to connect with senior software leaders from around the world.

- A 'We Care' experience: healthy food, a strict code of conduct, and a commitment to an inclusive and inspiring environment.

"QCon is the ONE event every software leader needs to attend to stay relevant."

Suresh Jeyachandran, Senior Management @DeNA and QCon San Francisco attendee

Topics Include

- Architectures You've Always Wondered About

- Architecting for Agents

- Something about Distributed Systems

- Staff+ Engineering Skills

- Code Beyond Engineers and Engineering Teams

- Guardrails and Safety Nets (Evals) for the New Landscape

- Modern API Design

- Real World Platform Engineering

- Developer Experience as a First-Class Architecture Concern

- Resilience Engineering: Everything Fails All the Time

- Engineering AI Systems

- Data Platforms Reimagined

At QCon San Francisco, You'll Always Find

- Senior software practitioners first.

- Real-world technical talks.

- No hidden marketing, no sales pitches, no hype.

- Hand-picked speakers by an international program committee.

- 'We Care' experience: healthy food and a strict code of conduct.

Bring Your Team

Technology decisions are getting harder to make in isolation. Send your team to QCon San Francisco 2026 to learn together from 60+ senior practitioners and leave aligned on direction, not just informed.

When your team attends together, members can split across tracks, compare notes across sessions, and return with a shared read on where the technology is heading. That shared context is hard to manufacture any other way.

QCon San Francisco brings together international engineering teams to align on technical direction and build peer relationships that extend well beyond the conference.

Group savings are available.

Time: 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

Prices:

Conference Ticket: USD 2235.00,

Conference + Certification Ticket: USD 2975.00,

Conference + Trainings (1 day): USD 2975.00,

Conference + Trainings (2 days): USD 3670.00