2026 Schedule
Schedule subject to change.
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Beginner
For those learning about a topic for the first time or looking to gain foundational knowledge before starting a project. For these presentations, you will walk away with a conceptual understanding, knowledge of basic tools, and/or the first steps required to try it out.
Intermediate
Sessions for those actively working with the technology daily and who want to improve their efficiency, testing, and/or application of best practices. In these sessions, you may learn concrete code examples, testing strategies, common pitfalls, and/or methods to solve medium-complexity problems.
Advanced
For the attendees who are actively designing or leading projects with a particular technology and want to understand complex trade-offs, scalability, and integration challenges. These sessions may allow you to gain unique, production-tested insights, architectural patterns, performance optimization tips, and/or analysis of design trade-offs.
Monday, March 16th, 2026
Badge Pick-Up & Continental Breakfast - 3rd & 5th Fl.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
From DVDs to Global Streaming: How Netflix’s Commerce Architecture Actually Evolved
Netflix didn’t start as a global streaming platform. It began as a US-centric DVD-by-mail business, with a commerce system designed for one country, one currency, and relatively simple payment flows.As Netflix expanded internationally, those early assumptions began to break.
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
The Hidden Power of Boring Problems
Every engineer faces the same dilemma: invest your limited time mastering the latest technology and framework, or go deeper on fundamental problems that feel "boring" but compound for decades to come?
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
From Fan-Out to Fast: Sub-100ms API Design in Distributed Systems
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.
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
How To Run on Three Clouds at Once, and When Not To
If you've made a bank transfer recently, there's a good chance that Form3 handled it. When we have a wobble, people notice.
Track:
Native Languages - and Wasm
A Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) Journey: From WASM in Go to State Machines in Rust
Deterministic simulation testing finds bugs by exploring random execution paths, injecting failures, and letting you replay any failure with a single starting seed.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Performance at AI Scale: What We Learned at monday.com
For years, performance engineering at monday.com focused on both client and server: identifying shifting bottlenecks, optimizing data flow, and ensuring responsiveness at scale.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Evolution of Booking.com's Ranking Platform
Details coming soon.
Fleming (3rd Fl.)
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
The Sociotechnical Staff Engineer: Architecture, Culture and Organizational Change
In today’s complex engineering landscape, Staff+ engineers, architects, and technical leaders can no longer operate solely as technical experts.
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
APIs for Agents: Rethinking API Programs in the MCP Era
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.
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
Building Payment Systems That Thrive on Cloud Turbulence
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Native Languages - and Wasm
Unconference: Native Languages
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
From Pilot to Impact: How AI Is Transforming Large‑Scale Engineering
In large, highly regulated enterprises like ING, adopting AI in engineering isn’t as simple as enabling a new tool — it’s a fundamental shift in how thousands of engineers design, build, and deliver software.
Lunch Located on 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 5th Fl. & Lunch Topic Discussions Located on 1st Fl.
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Evolving Wise Architecture to Power a Global Account
We all strive for loosely coupled and highly cohesive systems, yet as products scale, it is not uncommon for architecture to drift towards a “distributed big ball of mud” where a single change requires cascading changes across multiple services.
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
All Tech Debt is NOT Created Equal
As we move into the era of AI, code that could be called slop or tech debt is increasing faster than ever. This means that managing that tech debt is just as important as ever. However, how do you prioritize which tech debt to work on? How do you convince others that any of it is important?
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
Beyond the Dashboard: Why 'Query-ability' is the New Observability
Details coming soon.
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
Unconference: Tech of Finance industry
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Native Languages - and Wasm
Designing Language-Agnostic Plugin Systems With Webassembly and Extism
Imagine a world where anyone could write plugins/extensions in any languages that interop with the application, regardless of your stack. Extism makes that real by using WebAssembly.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Avoid AI Concept Creep with a Knowledge Graph Created in Hours
Modern data lakes and streaming architectures are optimized for data Volume, Variety and Velocity, not for preserving the Meaning of the data.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Personalization at Zero-Latency: Architecting Real-Time Feature Stores
Details coming soon.
Fleming (3rd Fl.)
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
The Influence Toolkit
Senior IC roles are often said to be about influence – but what do we mean by influence? And what are the tools that a senior IC can employ to influence individuals and teams within a large organisation?
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
Unconference: Connecting Systems
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
Implementing Robust Financial Controls in Distributed Systems
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Native Languages - and Wasm
Efficiency and Isolation with Unikraft
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Maximising an Agentic AI Ecosystem: Trust, Control and Scale
Agentic AI is rapidly moving beyond individual assistants toward interconnected ecosystems of agents, tools, and platforms. This shift promises step‑change improvements in productivity and autonomy—but it also introduces new challenges around trust, control, and operational scale.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Bringing Real-Time AI to 40-Year-Old Mainframes
Details coming soon.
Fleming (3rd Fl.)
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
Unconference: Staff+ Engineering
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
Uncorking Queueing Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry
Queues are an essential component in a scalable distributed system, but going beyond the simple implementation creates an explosion of complexity to manage.
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
The Realities of Building an AI Native Fintech Startup
Details coming soon.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
The Rise of Runtime Intelligence: practical Lessons in Shipping Agentic Engineering Code to Production
Agentic engineering works remarkably well in controlled environments.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
Complexity and Creativity in Software Engineering
Software complexity is scaling beyond the limits of human comprehension. This session explores the evolution of this complexity and strategies to manage it.
Track:
Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
Async-First: Architecting for Event-Driven Connectivity
Details coming soon.
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Tech of Finance Industry
Modular Migration Patterns for Legacy Banking Core
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Context Engineering: Building the Knowledge Layer AI Agents Need
Every AI coding tool can generate code. Very few can generate the right code for your organization — because they're missing context.
Conference Social on 1st & 2nd Fl. - Drinks & Nibbles
Tuesday, March 17th, 2026
Continental Breakfast - 3rd & 5th Fl.
Conference Introduction and Keynote:
Keynote Presentation with Martin Kleppmann
Fleming + Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Break
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
Introducing Tansu.io -- Rethinking Kafka for Lean Operations
Tansu is an open-source, Apache Kafka®-compatible messaging broker designed to be simpler and more flexible than traditional Kafka clusters.
Track:
AI Engineering
Reliable Retrieval for Production AI Systems
Search is central to many AI systems. Everyone is building RAG and agents right now, but few are building reliable retrieval systems.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
Team Topologies as the 'Infrastructure for Agency' with AI
Details coming soon.
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
Why Governance Matters: The Key to Reducing Risk Without Slowing Down
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.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Engineering for the Long Haul: Operating Open Source at Scale
Open-source software powers the world’s most innovative enterprises, but keeping it secure, compliant, and reliable over the long haul is where complexity (and unexpected risk) quietly creeps in.
Break
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
The Rise of the Streamhouse: Idea, Trade-Offs, and Evolution
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.
Track:
AI Engineering
Beyond Context Windows: Building Cognitive Memory for AI Agents
AI agents are rapidly changing how users interact with software, yet most agentic systems today operate with little to no intelligent memory, relying instead on brittle context-window heuristics or short-term state.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
Blurring the Lines: Engineering & Data Working Teams in the Age of AI
Every senior engineer knows the feeling: a model makes a bad decision, a customer complains, and suddenly you're debugging a system that spans three teams, two pipelines, and a machine learning model nobody fully owns. Where do you even start?
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
Building on Bedrock: A Security Philosophy from Bootloader to Runtime
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.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Sponsored session powered by Yugabite
Details coming soon!
Westminster (4th Fl.)
Lunch Located on 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 5th Fl. & Lunch Topic Discussions Located on 1st Fl.
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
From S3 to GPU in One Copy: Rethinking Data Loading for ML Training
ML training pipelines treat data as static. Teams spend weeks preprocessing datasets into WebDataset or TFRecords, and when they want to experiment with curriculum learning or data mixing, they reprocess everything from scratch.
Track:
AI Engineering
Refreshing Stale Code Intelligence
Coding models are helping software developers move even faster than ever before, but weirdly, they’re not keeping up with our fast progress. The models that power code generation are often based on months to years old snapshots of open source code.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
The Ladder Is Missing Rungs: Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
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.
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
From Chaos to Clarity: Modern SBOM Practices That Actually Work
In this talk, Viktor will walk you through everything you need to know to build a practical and future ready SBOM strategy.
Track:
Debugging Distributed Systems
Unconference: Debugging Distributed Systems
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Sponsored session powered by Dynatrace
Details coming soon!
Westminster (4th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
Ontology‐Driven Observability: Building the E2E Knowledge Graph at Netflix Scale
As Netflix scales hundreds of client platforms, microservices, and infrastructure components, correlating user experience with system performance has become a hard data problem, not just an observability one.
Track:
AI Engineering
Rewriting All of Spotify's Code Base, All the Time
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.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
Building a Culture of Psychological Safety
Details coming soon.
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
Unconference: Software Security & Risk Management
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Debugging Distributed Systems
Stitching Together Traces in a World of Async Callbacks
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Sponsored session powered by Runpod
Westminster (4th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
Building a Control Plane for Production AI
Details coming soon.
Fleming (3rd Fl.)
Track:
AI Engineering
Building an AI Gateway Without Frameworks: One Platform, Many Agents
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.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
Unconference: Building Engineering Teams
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
Catching Attacks in the Act: eBPF for Runtime Security
Since the SolarWinds attack and the Biden-era cybersecurity executive order, much of the security industry’s energy has gone into preventing attacks in the software supply chain, before software is ever deployed. That work matters — but it is not enough.
Track:
Debugging Distributed Systems
Debugging Transient Failures in Serverless Workflows
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Sponsored session powered by Kurrent
Details coming soon!
Westminster (4th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Modern Data Engineering & Architectures
Unconference: Modern Data Engineering
Rutherford (4th Fl.)
Track:
AI Engineering
Sync Agents in Production: Failure Modes and Fixes
As models improve, we are starting to build long-running, asynchronous agents such as deep research agents and browser agents that can execute multi-step workflows autonomously. These systems unlock new use cases, but they fail in ways that short-lived agents do not.
Track:
Building Engineering Teams
From Copilots to Orchestrators: A Three-Month Playbook for Training AI-Native Engineering Teams
Most engineering teams are stuck treating AI as autocomplete. Engineers have GitHub Copilot installed (or Claude or Cursor or whatever), they're generating snippets faster, but leaders can't connect usage to business outcomes—and developers are shipping code they don't fully understand.
Track:
Software Security & Risk Management
Adopting Memory-Safety and Fine-Grained Compartmentalisation With CHERI
This talk will describe how CHERI achieves memory safety for existing code with just a recompile and how that non-bypassable memory safety can be used as a building block for higher-level security abstractions.
Track:
Debugging Distributed Systems
Real-Time Observability for Cross-Border Payment Rails
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Learning to Trust your AI Agents
AI agents are flooding codebases with far more code than humans can possibly review – so how do you verify the integrity and reliability of your software?
Exhibitor Reception for Attendees - Drinks & Nibbles on 3rd & 5th Fl. - Ends at 6:45pm
Wednesday, March 18th, 2026
Continental Breakfast - 3rd & 5th Fl.
Conference Introduction and Keynote:
Keynote Presentation with Laura Savino
Fleming + Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Break
Track:
Architecture in the Age of AI
The Right 300 Tokens Beat 100k Noisy Ones: The Architecture of Context Engineering
Your agent has 100k tokens of context. It still forgets what you told it two messages ago.
Track:
Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI's Impact on Engineering Teams
AI is an Amplifier: Scale High Performance, Not Dysfunction
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.
Track:
Architecting for Resilience
How to Find Resilience Bugs in Systems that Don't Exist
Building correct distributed systems takes thinking outside the box, and the fastest way to do that is to think inside a different box. One different box is "formal methods", the discipline of mathematically verifying software and systems.
Track:
Modern Performance Optimization
Navigating the Edge of Scale and Speed for Physics Discovery
Details coming soon.
Track:
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
The New Frontier of Frontend: Breaking Limits with Modern CSS
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Architecture in the Age of AI
Explicit Semantics for AI Applications: Ontologies in Practice
Modern AI applications struggle not because of a lack of models, but because meaning is implicit, fragmented, and brittle. In this talk, we’ll explore how making semantics explicit (using ontologies and knowledge graphs) changes how we design, build, and operate AI systems.
Track:
Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI's Impact on Engineering Teams
Leading Through the Fog: Transparent Communication Strategies for AI Integration
Details coming soon
Churchill (Ground Fl.)
Track:
Architecting for Resilience
Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet
Let's take back the internet! Learn about Spritely's work to re-decentralize the net with new foundational technologies that put users in control.
Track:
Modern Performance Optimization
Teaching Your Compiler to Do the Heavy Lifting on Modern CPUs
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
Evaluating CLI Usability for Humans and Agents
Details coming soon.
Lunch Located on 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 5th Fl. & Lunch Topic Discussions Located on 1st Fl.
Track:
Architecture in the Age of AI
Building an AI Ready Global Scale Data Platform
As organizations move from single-cloud setups to hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, they are under pressure to build data platforms that are both globally available and AI-ready.
Track:
Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI's Impact on Engineering Teams
Re-Aligning Engineering Org Charts for AI-Driven Delivery
Details coming soon.
Track:
Architecting for Resilience
Understanding Progressive Collapse: How To Avoid A Cascading Failure
Small things going wrong can quickly snowball. The cascading failure is often a nightmare scenario for any system. An initial problem, which in isolation seems like such a minor problem, can kick off a chain reaction of ever-increasing failures, potentially leading to catastrophic results.
Track:
Modern Performance Optimization
Not Just I/O: Using Async/Await for Computational Scheduling
In the past two years I have developed a new query execution engine for Polars, which not only tries to execute as much of your query in parallel as possible, but in a streaming fashion as well, such that you can process data sets which do not fit in memory.
Track:
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
Optimizing Performance with Smart Middleware and Edge Handlers
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Architecture in the Age of AI
Your Agent Sandbox Doesn't Know My Authz Model: A Standard-Shaped Hole
Sandboxes are the first line of defence for agentic systems: restrict the bash commands, filter the URLs, lock down the filesystem. But sandboxes operate on the syntax of requests, not the semantics of your authorization model.
Track:
Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI's Impact on Engineering Teams
Navigating New Performance KPIs in the Age of AI
Details coming soon.
Track:
Architecting for Resilience
Maintaining Data Integrity During Regional Outages
Details coming soon.
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Modern Performance Optimization
Using Data-Oriented Design to Minimize Cache Misses
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
How React Internals are Adapting to Fine-Grained Reactivity
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Break
Track:
Architecture in the Age of AI
Beyond Benchmarks: How Evaluations Ensure Safety at Scale in LLM Applications
As LLM systems move from prototypes to production, the gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability becomes impossible to ignore. Models that score well on benchmarks can still fail unpredictably when facing the complexity, ambiguity, and edge cases of real users.
Track:
Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI's Impact on Engineering Teams
The Psychology of Automation: Managing Fear and Boosting Morale During Radical Tech Shifts
Details coming soon.
Churchill (Ground Fl.)
Track:
Architecting for Resilience
Migrating Legacy Monoliths to Resilient Microservices Without Downtime
Details coming soon.
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
Track:
Modern Performance Optimization
Continuous Profiling in Production: Finding the "Needle in the Haystack" Without Slowing Down the User
Details coming soon.
Mountbatten (6th Fl.)
Track:
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
The Frontend Architect’s Guide to Multi-modal UIs
Details coming soon.
Windsor (5th Fl.)
QCon Closing Reception in Pickwick, 1st Fl. - Ends at 5:15pm
Thursday, March 19th, 2026
Continental Breakfast - Albert 2nd Fl.
Certification
09:00AM GMT - 12:30PM GMT (3 hours)
Become an InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies (ICSAET)
Luca Mezzalira - AWS
Gielgud (2nd Fl.)