As your role shifts from writing code to setting technical direction, the hard decisions are about strategy, execution, and accountability, and there's often no one at your level to compare notes with. In this cohort, senior engineers and architects from different companies apply frameworks from QCon talks to the leadership decisions they're working on, and share what worked and what didn't, in confidence.
Leave with new approaches, or validation that the calls you're already making are the right ones.
Live online sessions. 4 hours a week, for 5 weeks.
Next cohort: September 18, 2026
Limited places per cohort. Friday, 10:00AM PDT
USD1,470
per cohort
Most companies reimburse for professional development.
Download our
"Convince your manager"
template.
InfoQ Certified Engineering Leadership Cohort facilitator
Facilitated by Michelle Brush
Confidential peer group
Apply QCon frameworks
Access 100+ QCon videos
Get published on InfoQ
Earn an InfoQ certification
(PT, Los Angeles time)
Dates: Sep 18, 25, Oct 2, 9, 16
Time: Friday, 10:00AM PDT
Location: Online (Zoom)
Most companies reimburse for professional development.
Download our "Convince Your Manager" template.
The single most valuable outcome has been improving how I write and think. I can now articulate trade-offs in a way that improves my proposals at work.
Chinmay Sawaji,
Senior Software Engineer @Klaviyo
This cohort gave me structured time each week to step back and think about what it really means to be an architect.
David Holliday,
Product manager / Product Owner @Munich Re
The Architecture Canvas was a game changer. We've made different decisions because of how we're structuring conversations. It wasn't just theory.
Ian Hockett,
Staff Software Engineer @Exact Sciences
Understand how your organization actually works before you try to change it. Cover influence and behavior change, drawing on behavioral economics and industrial-organizational psychology, so you can assess and work within your own context.
Identify a business problem that matters, analyze it, and build a (socio)technical strategy for it. Work through systems thinking and the product, architecture, and systems engineering a strategy has to account for.
Turn strategy into delivered work. Cover risk-driven development, delegation, and the mechanisms that keep what gets built matched to the strategy.
Tell whether your strategy is working, and know which metrics will mislead you. Cover what it means to be accountable for an outcome while keeping blamelessness and psychological safety intact.
Account for the full cost of running a system after deploy, including capacity planning, support and operational load, and incident response. The session also covers the group capstone presentations, and the best articles get published on InfoQ .
These online cohorts are for senior engineers and architects who want to make specific leadership decisions better, publish on a platform senior technical people read, and build a peer group that outlasts the 5 weeks.
Designed for:
Each week, you apply a framework from a QCon talk to a leadership decision from
your own
work, alongside senior engineers and architects from different companies.
Watch a QCon talk on your own time before the session.
Join a 4-hour live session with your facilitator and your cohort.
Apply the framework to a decision from your own work, sharing what worked and what didn't with the group.
Take away something you can use at work that week.
4 hours of live sessions per week, plus time-boxed homework (max 2 hours). Designed to fit around your work.
Throughout the cohort, your working group takes a real leadership problem and builds a strategy for it: assessing the organization, defining the problem, planning execution and accountability, and accounting for the long-term cost of what you build. In week 5, you present it to the cohort. The best get published on InfoQ .
Apply frameworks from QCon talks to real leadership problems in group exercises. Sessions are 4 hours per week.
Work through strategy, execution, and accountability with engineers from different companies, industries, and contexts.
Earn an InfoQ certification as proof of your work on technical leadership.
Michelle Brush is an engineering leader with over 20 years of software development experience. She is an Engineering Director for SRE at Google, where she leads teams that keep GCP's Compute Engine and Persistent Disk products reliable. Before Google she was Director of HealtheIntent Architecture at Cerner, responsible for the data engineering platform behind Cerner's Population Health solutions, and earlier the lead engineer on Garmin's automotive routing algorithm. She wrote two chapters of 97 Things Every SRE Should Know, and has spoken at and served on the program committee for QCon San Francisco.
Engineering Director, SRE at Google
No. Sessions are not recorded. This is a deliberate choice to keep all conversations private and confidential, so that participants feel safe sharing real challenges, ongoing decisions, and truthful perspectives from their organizations.
Participants are expected to attend at least 4 out of the 5 live sessions. Consistent attendance is one of the criteria for receiving your InfoQ certification.
If you do need to miss a session:
You can contact us for any payment questions at payments@qconferences.com .
We accept PayPal and major credit cards. A payment charged to your credit card or PayPal account is processed directly by us in the funds stated on the website.
The Terms of Participation can be found at https://certification.qconferences.com/terms-conditions .
Registration fees are not refundable.
Yes, we've developed a template you can use to explain to your manager how you can benefit from the cohort participation.
Yes, in-person cohorts are offered at select QCon conferences, such as QCon London and QCon San Francisco.
You can opt to pay by invoice during the registration process by selecting the "Do You Want to Pay Later by Invoice?" checkbox.
Your invoice reflects the ticket price in effect at the time your payment is due. Invoices are generally due 30 days from the date the order is submitted, or 7 days before the event start date—whichever comes first. To ensure all funds are cleared, the "Pay by Invoice" option will be disabled 14 days prior to each event (subject to change without notice). All invoices must be paid in full no later than 7 days before the event begins.
Please note that only participants who have paid in full will be admitted or receive access credentials. Credit card or PayPal payment is required if you are registering after the invoice deadline or prefer immediate confirmation. Once processed, a receipt marked "Paid" will be emailed to you for your records.
Our Privacy Policy details how we collect, use, and protect your data. You can find it at https://www.infoq.com/privacy-policy .
Yes. The program is open to freelancers and the self-employed. When registering, simply enter your trading name or "Independent" in the Company Details section.
The program is a collaborative initiative between InfoQ and QCon, both of which are practitioner-driven brands owned by C4Media Inc.
InfoQ is a practitioner-driven community news site focused on facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in professional software development.
We do not offer scholarships or complimentary seats for the InfoQ Certification at this time. Should this change for future cohorts, we will announce it via our official channels.
We are dedicated to providing a safe and inclusive experience for everyone. Our Code of Conduct can be found at https://certification.qconferences.com/code-conduct .
Participants who registered for the online cohorts will receive an email with detailed instructions on how to join the sessions during the week prior to the start of the cohort.
To ensure an optimal experience, you will need:
The program consists of five live sessions held over five weeks, each lasting four hours, plus weekly assignments and a group Capstone project.
Yes, alumni enrolling in a second Certification program receive a $147 discount. To claim your alumni code, please email certification@qconferences.com when ready to register for your second program.
Each weekly session is a 4-hour live session. This is a significant time investment because we apply frameworks to real-world challenges alongside the peer group.
This program assumes you already have deep technical expertise. Each week is structured around a real decision you are working on. The focus is working through decisions with peers, articulating tradeoffs, and making hard-to-reverse calls.
Some of the most valuable learning happens in peer discussion. Hearing how others think through similar challenges can be just as useful as the session content itself.
Learning with a peer group gives you different perspectives, helps you build confidence, and makes it easier to apply what you learn in your own work. That's why this program is designed around a confidential peer group, live exercises, expert facilitation, and group-based project assignments, and not just self-paced study.
This cohort gives you the confidential peer group and an experienced facilitator to do that work, and you'll earn the InfoQ Certified Engineering Leadership Program certification as a result.
The Capstone project is the final milestone where your working group co-authors a 2,000–3,000-word professional technical article documenting a technical leadership strategy for a real problem. Examples can be found on InfoQ.com .
Certification is awarded based on two factors: consistent attendance and active participation in the live sessions, and the successful completion of the group Capstone project.
This is for senior, lead, and principal engineers, staff engineers, software architects, technical leads, engineering managers, and other senior technical leaders with at least 5 years of experience who are moving into or already holding technical leadership responsibility.
Certification is awarded based on active participation in the cohort and completion of the capstone assessment in Week 5.
Securing and governing AI systems in production. Sensitive data handling, threat modeling and red teaming, controls and sandboxes, observability and evals, governance and auditing
Date: October 14, 2026
Time: Mon & Wed, 03:00PM - 05:00PM CEST
The sociotechnical side of architecture. Trade-offs and communication, decentralized decision-making, platform engineering, AI architecture decisions.
Move from writing code to setting technical direction. Four hours a week, across five weeks, with Michelle Brush. Test your decisions with senior peers.
Building production software with AI coding agents. Codebase comprehension, agent permissions and sandboxing, sensors and self-correction, independent review, CI for unattended agents.
Building AI systems that hold up in production. AI-native engineering, RAG and context pipelines, AI agents, platform and infrastructure, evals and reliability.
Date: Dates to be announced
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