Every year, senior developers and architects attend QCon events to get answers to the technical questions their organizations are wrestling with:
- Is our architecture ready for the AI features the product wants?
- How do I debug a distributed system that fails in ways I can’t reproduce?
- Should we rewrite this application in Rust or optimize what we have?
- What does a resilient engineering organization look like when half my workflow may change in 18 months?
These questions don’t usually get answered in platform demos or promotional talks. They come from people who’ve had to solve them under real constraints. QCon London returns to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on March 16-19, 2026, bringing together 75+ peer-selected speakers across 15 curated tracks, each exploring the real-world patterns, trade-offs, and architectural decisions from systems that actually run in production.
This year’s program focuses on the problems senior engineers and architects are dealing with right now.
On AI adoption and its organizational impact
- AI Engineering
- Architecture in the Age of AI
- Organizations in Flux: Navigating and Managing AI’s Impact on Engineering Teams
On systems that need to scale, survive, and remain observable
- Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About
- Debugging Distributed Systems
- Modern Performance Optimization
- Architecting for Resilience
On leading through uncertainty and complexity
- The Long Game: Staff+ Engineering Agency and the Art of Thriving Through Hype-Cycles
- Building Engineering Teams
- Modern Software Security & Risk Management
On the technical decisions keeping teams up at night
- Modern Native Languages and WASM
- Modern Data Architectures
- Connecting Systems: APIs, Protocols, Observability
- Tech of the Finance Industry
- Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile
Each track is curated by an active senior software practitioner who understands what scales, what breaks, and what actually matters in production.
Who’s Curating the Program
Every year, the design of the QCon program starts the same way: with a group of senior engineers comparing notes about what’s changing in the field and what isn’t. The tracks are a reflection of those conversations. They come from practitioners who have had to justify technical decisions, scale architectures, and debug the consequences. It’s a peer-driven view of where software engineering is actually heading.
- Eder Ignatowicz, Senior Principal Software Engineer & Architect @Red Hat AI; Chair, InfoQ Dev Summit Boston; Program Co-chair, QCon London
- Erica Pisani, Senior Software Engineer @Float Financial; Speaker & creator of The 418
- Blanca Garcia Gil, Transformational Coach; Principal Engineer; LeadDev StaffPlus Host; Former Principal Engineer @BBC
- Werner Schuster, Kernel Developer @Wolfram; InfoQ Editor (Functional Programming)
- Srini Penchikala, Senior Software Architect; Lead Editor for AI/ML/Data Engineering @InfoQ
- Ian Thomas, Software Engineer @Meta; QCon London & San Francisco Co-Chair
Join us at QCon London 2026 to learn from senior practitioners, sharpen your technical judgment, and validate the architectural and technology decisions shaping your roadmap.
Registration is open now. Early bird pricing available.
