202025 Edition

QCon SF 2025

Practitioner-Driven AI Engineering

Agent platforms, eval-driven development, and internal AI tools took center stage. The conversation shifted from 'should we use AI' to 'how do we make AI systems reliable enough to deploy.'

Nov 17-21·Hyatt Regency SF·112 talks·4,300+ attendees

Program

Mon · Nov 17

8:00 AM

BreakRegistration & Breakfast

9:00 AMKeynote

Eval-Driven Development: A New Engineering Discipline

Shreya Shankar

ML Engineer & Author

10:15 AM

BreakMorning Coffee & Expo Hall Opens

10:45 AM

TalkEval Harnesses: Testing AI Systems Like Software

Ankur Patel · ML Engineer, Databricks

10:45 AM

TalkMulti-Agent Architectures in Production

Hien Lu · Sr. Engineering Manager, Move Inc.

10:45 AM

TalkBuilding an Internal AI Code Review Bot

Sepehr Khorram · ML Platform Engineer, Cruise

11:45 AM

TalkMeasuring Agent Quality: Beyond Accuracy

Krystal Flores-Bay · Staff SWE, Lumen Labs

11:45 AM

TalkCustom Tool Use in LLM Agents: Patterns and Pitfalls

Zhi Xiong · Head of AIOps, Weaviate

11:45 AM

TalkAI-Assisted On-Call: Reducing Toil with LLMs

Charlotte Newman · Engineering Director, Zapier

12:45 PM

BreakLunch Break & Birds-of-a-Feather Tables

1:45 PM

TalkAgent Orchestration Patterns We Learned the Hard Way

Vanessa Huerta · Director of Engineering, Anthropic

1:45 PM

TalkEval-Driven Development in Practice: A Case Study

Ankur Patel · ML Engineer, Databricks

1:45 PM

TalkBuilding AI-Powered Documentation Search That Actually Works

David Patterson · Distinguished Engineer, Stripe

2:45 PM

BreakAfternoon Coffee & Expo Hall

3:15 PM

TalkThe Economics of AI-Assisted Development

Kelsey Hightower · Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud

3:15 PM

TalkPrompt Caching and Cost Optimization for Agent Workloads

Hien Lu · Sr. Engineering Manager, Move Inc.

3:15 PM

TalkDesigning Evals That Don't Flake

Krystal Flores-Bay · Staff SWE, Lumen Labs

4:15 PM

TalkAgent-to-Agent Communication Protocols

Zhi Xiong · Head of AIOps, Weaviate

5:15 PM

SocialWelcome Reception & Sponsor AI Showcase

Drinks, appetizers, and live demos of production AI systems in the expo hall.

Tue · Nov 18

9:00 AM

TalkBuilding an Internal Platform for LLM Experimentation

Sepehr Khorram · ML Platform Engineer, Cruise

9:00 AM

TalkHuman-in-the-Loop Agent Design

Vanessa Huerta · Director of Engineering, Anthropic

10:00 AM

TalkRetrieval Strategies Beyond Vector Search

Zhi Xiong · Head of AIOps, Weaviate

10:00 AM

TalkBuilding Trust in AI-Generated Code: A Team Playbook

Charlotte Newman · Engineering Director, Zapier

11:00 AM

BreakMorning Coffee & Sponsor Expo

11:30 AM

TalkAgent Memory: Short-Term, Long-Term, and Everything Between

Ankur Patel · ML Engineer, Databricks

11:30 AM

TalkFrom Copilot to Autopilot: When to Let Agents Loose

Hien Lu · Sr. Engineering Manager, Move Inc.

12:30 PM

BreakLunch Break & Unconference Sessions

1:30 PM

TalkCI/CD for AI: Testing, Eval, and Deployment Pipelines

Sepehr Khorram · ML Platform Engineer, Cruise

2:30 PM

BreakAfternoon Coffee & Hallway Track

3:00 PM

TalkObservability for Agent Systems: Traces, Logs, and Decision Audit Trails

David Patterson · Distinguished Engineer, Stripe

3:00 PM

TalkThe Staff Engineer's Guide to Leading AI Adoption

Krystal Flores-Bay · Staff SWE, Lumen Labs

4:00 PM

WorkshopDesigning an Eval Framework for Your AI Product

Vanessa Huerta · Director of Engineering, Anthropic

Wed · Nov 19

9:00 AM

TrainingRAG Systems from Scratch

Jerry Liu · Creator, LlamaIndex

Full-day workshop building a production RAG system: chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, retrieval algorithms, and re-ranking.

12:00 PM

BreakLunch Break

1:00 PM

TrainingBuilding Multi-Agent Systems with LangGraph

Hien Lu · Sr. Engineering Manager, Move Inc.

Half-day hands-on workshop building and deploying a multi-agent system with stateful orchestration.

9:00 AM

TrainingEval-Driven Development Workshop

Krystal Flores-Bay · Staff SWE, Lumen Labs

Half-day workshop: design, implement, and iterate on an evaluation harness for an AI-powered feature.

12:00 PM

BreakLunch Break

1:00 PM

PanelClosing Panel: The Agent Era — What We Know, What We Don't, and What's Next

Shreya Shankar, Jerry Liu, Kelsey Hightower, Vanessa Huerta · QCon SF 2025 Track Hosts

2:30 PM

BreakConference Close & Farewell