Platform Engineering at QCon London 2026

Details coming soon.

Details coming soon.

AI adoption in software development is nearly universal, yet the outcomes for teams are highly variable. Why do some organizations see massive productivity gains while others see their delivery stability crash? DORA’s latest research provides a key insight: AI acts as an amplifier.

Details coming soon.

Over the last decade, streaming architectures have largely been built around topic-centric primitives—logs, streams, and event pipelines—then stitched together with databases, caches, OLAP engines, and (increasingly) new serving systems.

As API programs mature, a familiar gap emerges: some teams operate with strong standards, reusable platforms, and clear governance,  while others rely on informal guidance and best-effort consistency.

Career progression in engineering has traditionally followed a predictable path: junior tasks teach fundamentals, mid-level work builds judgment, senior roles require synthesis across systems.

Early AI integrations often start small: wrap an inference API, add a prompt, ship a feature. At Zoox, that approach grew into Cortex, a production AI gateway supporting multiple model providers, multiple modalities, and agentic workflows with dozens of tools, serving over 100 internal clients.

We don't need LLMs to write new code. We need them to clean up the mess we already made.

In mature organizations, we have to maintain and migrate the existing codebase. Engineers are constantly balancing new feature development with endless software upkeep.

A “simple” API request rarely stays simple. In distributed systems, one call quickly turns into fan-out across gateways, services, caches, and databases — and your p99 becomes the sum of every hop and every flaky dependency.

In Minecraft, every world is built from blocks. At the very bottom lies bedrock: an unbreakable foundation that everything else rests on. Above it sit layers of stone, dirt, sand, and other materials.

When you hear “governance,” you might think of red tape, bureaucracy, or someone telling you what you can’t do. But real governance is about alignment and reducing technical risk. And that matters more than ever.