10 AI-Related Standout Sessions at QCon San Francisco 2025
QCon San Francisco 2025 lands November 17-21 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Across 15 tracks, AI threads through almost everything software leaders care about: speed, safety, scale, and real results. Here are 10 sessions (in no particular order) worth your attention if you build or lead engineering teams.
"Accelerating LLM-Driven Developer Productivity at Zoox" - Amit Navindgi @Zoox
A practical blueprint for scaling an organization's AI capabilities with real design patterns and org strategies. Expect tactics you can apply without boiling the ocean.
- Templates for internal copilots, review bots, and automated QA
- Governance patterns for prompts, evals, and data boundaries
- Metrics that track shipped features, cycle time, and model ROI
"Engineering at AI Speed: Lessons from the First Agentically Accelerated Software Project" - Adam Wolff @Anthropic
How Claude Code's architecture favors speed over complexity, with agents that help but don't block. Useful for teams balancing experimentation with production-grade reliability.
- Thin-agent patterns that keep humans in control
- Event-driven flows, retries, and deterministic fallbacks
- What to simplify first to reduce latency and surprises
"Deep Research for Enterprise: Unlocking Actionable Intelligence from Complex Enterprise Data with Agentic AI" - Vinaya Polamreddi @Glean
Turning messy, multi-system enterprise data into answers people trust. Covers scalable design and advanced training methods for agentic research workflows.
- Cross-source retrieval with strict permissioning
- Grounding, provenance, and audit trails for compliance
- E2E evaluation: precision, freshness, and task completion
"The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn't Enough" - Ben Greene @Tessi
The engineer's role is expanding beyond code. This session reframes impact across systems, products, and human workflows.
- Systems thinking over ticket thinking
- Prompt + product + process as a single toolchain
- Outcome metrics: time saved, error reduction, enablement
"Dynamic Moments: Weaving LLMs into Deep Personalization at DoorDash" - Sudeep Das and Pradeep Muthukrishnan @DoorDash
How to blend LLMs with real-time signals to personalize at scale. Strong fit for teams owning growth, recommendations, and marketplace dynamics.
- Feature pipelines that respond in milliseconds
- Safety rails for toxic content and bias
- Online testing strategies: explore/exploit without regressions
"Designing Fast, Delightful UX with LLMs in Mobile Frontends" - Bala Ramdoss @Amazon
UX principles that make LLM features feel instant and reliable on mobile. Architecture meets design to remove friction.
- Latency budgets, streaming UI, and optimistic updates
- Fallbacks, timeouts, and partial responses that don't frustrate
- Offline strategies and smart caching for flaky networks
"One Platform to Serve Them All: Autoscaling Multi-Model LLM Serving" - Meryem Arik @Doubleword
A technical breakdown of multi-model serving without runaway costs. Covers shared base weights, hot-swapped adapters, and smart eviction.
- Adapter-based routing (LoRA, prefix-tuning) with fast swaps
- Dynamic loading and tiered memory for GPU efficiency
- Autoscaling on tokens/sec, not just requests/sec
"From Content to Agents: Scaling LLM Post-Training Through Real-World Applications and Simulation" - Faye Zhang @Pinterest and Andi Partov @Veris AI
Post-training that moves beyond benchmarks into production. From content generation to simulation-based agent training that learns from real tasks.
- Leveraging production data for SFT and preference tuning
- Offline RLHF and simulator-driven evaluation loops
- Agent tooling, planning, and action constraints
"Powering the Future: Building Your GenAI Infrastructure Stack" - Maggie Hu and Merrin Kurian @Intuit
Inside a platform that serves ~100M users with vector stores, prompt management, RAG pipelines, and agent orchestration.
- Reference stack: data layer, retrieval, orchestration, observability
- Multi-tenant security, PII handling, and policy enforcement
- Cost controls: caching, compression, model routing
"AI-Driven Productivity: From Idea to Impact" - Jyothi Nookula @Stealth Startup
A pragmatic framework to convert GenAI enthusiasm into shipped product and measurable impact. Less slideware, more scorecards.
- Idea triage using value vs. feasibility scoring
- Proof-of-value before proof-of-concept
- Change management: training, playbooks, and adoption metrics
Why this matters
These sessions focus on what actually ships: lower latency, safer outputs, repeatable infrastructure, and clear ROI. If you lead teams, you'll find patterns to reduce risk while moving fast.
Attend and go deeper
QCon San Francisco 2025 runs November 17-21 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Check the full schedule and details on the official site.
QCon San Francisco 2025 - Official Site
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