# InfoQ Online Certification Cohorts

Five-week live online cohorts for senior engineers and software architects, ending in an InfoQ certification.

> Each week, participants watch a QCon talk on their own time, then join a four-hour live session where they apply the framework to a decision they are working on right now, alongside senior engineers from other companies and industries. Sessions are not recorded, so the group can talk about live decisions in confidence. 5 programs currently run on the site: AI Security & Privacy Engineering, Architecture, Engineering Leadership, AI-Assisted Engineering, and AI Engineering. USD1,470 per cohort. Four hours a week, for five weeks.

Run by C4Media, the team behind InfoQ and QCon.

[See upcoming cohorts](https://certification.qconferences.com/#choose-cohort)

## Key facts

- **Product:** InfoQ online certification cohorts
- **Website:** https://certification.qconferences.com
- **Operator:** C4Media Inc., the team behind InfoQ and QCon
- **Format:** live online sessions on Zoom, four hours a week for five weeks, plus time-boxed homework of up to two hours a week
- **Price:** USD1,470 per cohort
- **Audience:** senior software engineers, software architects, staff and principal engineers, technical leads, engineering managers, and engineering directors with at least five years of experience
- **Cohort make-up:** a small cohort of senior engineers and software architects with a minimum of five years' experience
- **Recording:** sessions are not recorded, by design, so participants can discuss live decisions in confidence
- **Attendance:** participants are expected to attend at least four of the five live sessions
- **Certification:** awarded for attendance and active participation plus completion of the capstone
- **Alumni discount:** USD 147 off a second program
- **Refunds:** registration fees are not refundable
- **Payment:** PayPal and major credit cards, or pay later by invoice
- **Contact:** certification@qconferences.com. Payment questions: payments@qconferences.com
- **Waitlist:** https://certification.qconferences.com/#cohorts-subscribe

## The cohorts

| Cohort | Credential | Facilitator | Next intake | Page |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| AI Security & Privacy Engineering | InfoQ Certified AI Security & Privacy Engineering Program | Katharine Jarmul | August 26, 2026 | https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-security-privacy |
| Architecture | InfoQ Certified Architect Program | Luca Mezzalira | September 14, 2026 | https://certification.qconferences.com/architecture |
| Engineering Leadership | InfoQ Certified Engineering Leadership Program | Michelle Brush | September 18, 2026 | https://certification.qconferences.com/engineering-leadership |
| AI-Assisted Engineering | InfoQ Certified AI-Assisted Engineering Program | Zichuan Xiong and Premanand Chandrasekaran | September 18, 2026 | https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-assisted-engineering |
| AI Engineering | InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program (ICAEP) | Hien Luu | Dates to be announced, waitlist open | https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-engineering |

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## AI Security & Privacy Engineering

**Credential:** InfoQ Certified AI Security & Privacy Engineering Program.
**Facilitator:** Katharine Jarmul, author of "Practical Data Privacy" (O'Reilly, available in three languages), privacy and security expert in machine learning and AI systems. Opening keynote speaker at InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025 and a QCon speaker.
**Focus:** Securing and governing AI systems in production. Sensitive data handling, threat modeling and red teaming, controls and sandboxes, observability and evals, governance and auditing
**Page:** https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-security-privacy
**Syllabus:** [PDF](https://certification.qconferences.com/modules/custom/qcon_home/assets/Program-Syllabus-InfoQ-Certified-AI-Security-&-Privacy-Engineering-Program.pdf)

**Published intakes**

| Intake | Dates | Time (with timezone) | Location |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| August | Aug 26, Sep 2, 9, 16, 23 | Wednesday, 02:00PM CEST | Online (Zoom) |
| October | Oct 14, 19, 21, 26, 28, Nov 2, 4, 9, 11, 16 | Mon & Wed, 03:00PM - 05:00PM CEST | Online (Zoom) |

**Week by week**

1. **Working with Sensitive Data and AI.** What counts as sensitive, where it leaks, and how to handle it before it reaches a model.
2. **Threat Modeling and Red Teaming.** Prioritize the threats that matter and run hands-on red teaming against an LLM, drawing on STRIDE, LINDDUN, and Plot4AI.
3. **Necessary Controls: Guardrails, Data Flow Controls and Sandboxes.** Guardrails, data-flow sanitization, and sandboxes, including open-weight guardrail models. Decide which control belongs where.
4. **Observability, Testing and Evaluations.** Check the controls actually work, using observability tools such as Arize Phoenix, and build evaluation suites that catch failures before users do.
5. **Building out Governance and Auditing.** Who owns safety, privacy, and security, and the governance and auditing to back it up, plus the group capstone presentations.

**Capstone:** a documented risk assessment and mitigation report for an AI product architecture, written as a technical article of 2,000 to 3,000 words and presented in week 5.

**Who it is for:** software engineers, AI/ML platform engineers, privacy and security engineers, software architects, and technical leaders with at least five years of experience working on AI security and privacy engineering in regulated industries.

---

## Architecture

**Credential:** InfoQ Certified Architect Program. Graduates earn the InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies (ICSAET) certification.
**Facilitator:** Luca Mezzalira, principal solutions architect, author of "Building Micro-Frontends" (O'Reilly), 350+ speaking engagements including QCon, and the voice behind Dear Architects.
**Focus:** The sociotechnical side of architecture. Trade-offs and communication, decentralized decision-making, platform engineering, AI architecture decisions.
**Page:** https://certification.qconferences.com/architecture
**Syllabus:** [PDF](https://certification.qconferences.com/modules/custom/qcon_home/assets/Program-Syllabus-InfoQ-Certified-Architect-Program.pdf)

**Published intakes**

| Intake | Dates | Time (with timezone) | Location |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| September | Sep 14, 21, Oct 5, 12, 19 | Monday, 09:30AM BST | Online (Zoom) |
| October | Oct 9, 23, 30, Nov 6, 13 | Friday, 09:30AM BST | Online (Zoom) |

**Week by week**

1. **Architecture.** The evolving role of the architect and core resilience patterns for distributed systems, including timeouts, retries, and idempotency. Weigh infrastructure choices and articulate the trade-offs to a CTO.
2. **Decentralized Decisions.** Enable teams to make their own architectural decisions, with the boundaries that keep changes from causing system-wide issues.
3. **Platform.** Platform engineering as a sociotechnical practice. The tensions between standardization and flexibility, and how to get real developer adoption rather than shadow IT.
4. **AI.** The architectural challenges AI introduces. Systems thinking for AI agents and multi-agent architectures, focused on constraints and trade-offs rather than capability evaluation.
5. **AI in Architecture, and Capstone Presentations.** The practical state of AI in the software development lifecycle. Most of the week is capstone presentations and peer discussion.

**Capstone:** a technical article of 2,000 to 3,000 words drafted across the cohort and presented in week 5. The best are published on InfoQ. Published examples: https://www.infoq.com/architecture-icsaet/

**Who it is for:** senior software architects, senior software engineers, principal architects, principal engineers, senior staff engineers, and technical leads with at least five years of experience who are involved in setting technical strategy.

---

## Engineering Leadership

**Credential:** InfoQ Certified Engineering Leadership Program.
**Facilitator:** Michelle Brush, Engineering Director for SRE at Google, where she leads teams that keep GCP Compute Engine and Persistent Disk reliable. Previously Director of HealtheIntent Architecture at Cerner and lead engineer on Garmin's automotive routing algorithm. Contributor to "97 Things Every SRE Should Know", QCon San Francisco speaker and program committee member.
**Focus:** Move from writing code to setting technical direction. Four hours a week, across five weeks, with Michelle Brush. Test your decisions with senior peers.
**Page:** https://certification.qconferences.com/engineering-leadership
**Syllabus:** [PDF](https://certification.qconferences.com/modules/custom/qcon_home/assets/Program-Syllabus-InfoQ-Certified-Engineering-Leadership-Program.pdf)

**Published intakes**

| Intake | Dates | Time (with timezone) | Location |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| September | Sep 18, 25, Oct 2, 9, 16 | Friday, 10:00AM PDT | Online (Zoom) |

**Week by week**

1. **Organizational Foundations.** How your organization actually works before you try to change it. Influence and behavior change, drawing on behavioral economics and industrial-organizational psychology.
2. **Technical Strategy.** Identify a business problem that matters, analyze it, and build a sociotechnical strategy for it, covering the product, architecture, and systems engineering the strategy has to account for.
3. **Technical Execution.** Turn strategy into delivered work: risk-driven development, delegation, and the mechanisms that keep what gets built matched to the strategy.
4. **Measurement and Accountability.** Tell whether the strategy is working, and know which metrics will mislead you. What accountability for an outcome means while keeping blamelessness and psychological safety intact.
5. **Safety, Sustainability, and Resilience.** The full cost of running a system after deploy, including capacity planning, support and operational load, and incident response, plus the group capstone presentations.

**Capstone:** the working group takes a real leadership problem and builds a strategy for it, covering the organizational assessment, the problem definition, execution and accountability, and the long-term cost of what gets built. Written up as a technical article of 2,000 to 3,000 words and presented in week 5.

**Who it is for:** senior, lead, and principal engineers, staff engineers, software architects, technical leads, engineering managers, and engineering directors with at least five years of experience who are moving into or already holding technical leadership responsibility.

---

## AI-Assisted Engineering

**Credential:** InfoQ Certified AI-Assisted Engineering Program.
**Facilitators:** Zichuan Xiong, Head of AIOps, who has led architecture and delivery work since 2008 and now builds agentic AI systems for software operations. Premanand Chandrasekaran, Head of Technology, who has spent two decades leading engineering teams across financial services, retail, education, and healthcare with a focus on continuous delivery and internal quality. Both teach harness engineering at QCon San Francisco.
**Focus:** Building production software with AI coding agents. Codebase comprehension, agent permissions and sandboxing, sensors and self-correction, independent review, CI for unattended agents.
**Page:** https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-assisted-engineering
**Syllabus:** [PDF](https://certification.qconferences.com/modules/custom/qcon_home/assets/Program-Syllabus-InfoQ-Certified-AI-Assisted-Engineering-Program.pdf)

The harness is everything in an AI coding agent except the model: the context you give it, the permissions it runs under, the sensors that catch mistakes, and the review and CI gates it has to pass. Over five weeks, participants build one against a real brownfield codebase and log their own results.

**Published intakes**

| Intake | Dates | Time (with timezone) | Location |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| September | Sep 18, 25, Oct 2, 9, 16 | Friday, 09:00AM PDT | Online (Zoom) |
| October | Oct 19, 26, Nov 2, 9, 16 | Monday, 09:00AM PDT | Online (Zoom) |

**Week by week**

1. **Comprehending the Codebase, Onboarding the Agent.** Use an agent to understand an unfamiliar brownfield codebase and capture what you learn as durable context files. Onboard the agent like a new team member, with least-privilege permissions and sandboxing.
2. **Making the Change Well.** Turn a thin ticket into a requirement an agent and a reviewer can verify against. Add characterization tests and the sensors that let the agent correct itself.
3. **Independent Verification Before a Human Sees It.** Separate generation from review. Use an independent review harness rather than asking the generating agent to grade its own work, then triage what actually needs a human.
4. **Integrating: CI as the Team's Harness.** Move verification from your own loop into the pipeline. Place each sensor by cost, add drift and health checks, and govern agents running unattended in CI.
5. **Propagating and Proving It.** Codify recurring review findings into rules a new team could adopt, then compare five weeks of logged data against what you predicted in week one. The session also covers the capstone presentations.

**Capstone:** this cohort does not use the shared article capstone. Participants work a single brownfield repository across all five weeks and submit three things: the harnessed repository, one rule or agent skill codified from their own recurring review findings, and a write-up comparing their logged results against their week-one predictions.

**Who it is for:** senior, lead, and principal engineers, staff engineers, software architects, technical leads, platform and SRE engineers, and engineering managers and directors with at least five years of experience who already use coding agents on production code.

**Tooling:** the hands-on exercises anchor on Claude Code, and Claude Max or API access is recommended. The principles transfer to Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and other agents. Participants work against a shared brownfield capstone repository provided for the cohort, so everyone starts from the same point and can compare approaches.

**How it differs from AI Engineering:** the AI Engineering cohort is for engineers building AI systems, covering RAG and context pipelines, agent design, evaluation, and the infrastructure underneath. This cohort is for engineers building any software with the help of coding agents. If you ship a product that has AI in it, start with AI Engineering. If you ship a product that AI helps you write, start here.

---

## AI Engineering

**Credential:** InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program (ICAEP).
**Facilitator:** Hien Luu, AI/ML Leader, Advisor, Speaker, and Author. Author of "MLOps with Ray" and "Beginning Apache Spark 3". Has presented at MLOps World, QCon San Francisco, QCon New York, QCon London, GHC 2022, and Data+AI Summit.
**Focus:** Building AI systems that hold up in production. AI-native engineering, RAG and context pipelines, AI agents, platform and infrastructure, evals and reliability.
**Page:** https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-engineering
**Syllabus:** [PDF](https://certification.qconferences.com/modules/custom/qcon_home/assets/Program-Syllabus-InfoQ-Certified-AI-Engineering-Program.pdf)

**Published intakes:** none currently. Dates are to be announced. Join the waitlist at https://certification.qconferences.com/#cohorts-subscribe

**Week by week**

1. **Becoming an AI-Native Engineering Team.** Identify where AI changes daily engineering habits and architectural trade-offs in your own organization, and where it does not.
2. **Designing and Building RAG and Context Pipelines.** Retrieval architectures, knowledge graphs, and memory pipelines that stay grounded as data changes and queries get harder.
3. **Designing and Building AI Agents.** Agentic systems that survive contact with production, from single-purpose tools to multi-agent orchestration, including the trade-offs between autonomy and control.
4. **AI Platforms and Infrastructure.** The platform layer that keeps AI systems running without overspending on inference. What to centralize, what to federate, and how to route batch and real-time workloads.
5. **AI Operational Excellence: Evals, Trust and Reliability.** The evaluation and operational practices that keep AI systems dependable in production, plus the group capstone presentations.

**Capstone:** a co-authored technical article of 2,000 to 3,000 words, presented in week 5. The best are published on InfoQ.

**Who it is for:** software engineers, AI/ML platform engineers, software architects, and technical leaders with at least five years of experience who are involved in setting technical strategy.

---

## How each week works

1. Watch a QCon talk on your own time before the session.
2. Join a four-hour live session with your facilitator and your cohort.
3. Apply the framework to a decision from your own work, sharing what worked and what did not with the group.
4. Take away something you can use at work that week.

Time commitment: four hours of live sessions per week, plus time-boxed homework of up to two hours. Most intakes run those four hours as a single weekly session; some split them into two shorter sessions in the same week. The total live hours and the five-week span are the same either way — the per-intake time above says which pattern an intake uses. Sessions run on Zoom. Participants also join a private Slack workspace for peer discussion between sessions.

## What participants get

- Frameworks from QCon talks applied to their own problems in group exercises
- A confidential peer group of senior engineers and architects from other companies and industries
- Access to 100+ QCon videos
- A capstone article, with the best published on InfoQ under the author's name
- An InfoQ certification

## Certification

Certification is awarded on two factors: consistent attendance and active participation in the live sessions, and successful completion of the capstone. Participants are expected to attend at least four of the five live sessions.

The certification program is a joint initiative between InfoQ and QCon, both practitioner-driven brands owned by C4Media Inc. Certification program details and published capstone articles: https://www.infoq.com/infoq-certification-program/

## Pricing and payment

All amounts in USD.

| Item | Amount |
| --- | --- |
| One cohort | USD1,470 |
| Alumni discount on a second program | 147 off |

- **Alumni discount:** email certification@qconferences.com for a code before registering for a second program.
- **Payment methods:** PayPal and major credit cards, processed by C4Media Inc., which is based in Canada. Customers outside Canada, or paying on cards denominated in other currencies, may be charged foreign transaction or exchange fees by their issuing bank. C4Media does not control or collect those fees.
- **Pay by invoice:** select the pay-later-by-invoice option during registration. The invoice reflects the price in effect when payment is due. Invoices are due 30 days from the order date or seven days before the cohort start date, whichever comes first. The invoice option is disabled 14 days before each start date. Only participants who have paid in full are admitted or receive access credentials.
- **Refunds:** registration fees are not refundable.
- **Scholarships:** no scholarships or complimentary seats are offered at this time.
- **Freelancers:** the program is open to freelancers and the self-employed. Enter a trading name or "Independent" in the company details field.
- **Payment questions:** payments@qconferences.com

## Making the case to your manager

Most companies reimburse for professional development. A template to send a manager is at https://certification.qconferences.com/content/convince-your-boss

## In-person cohorts

In-person cohorts run at selected QCon conferences, including QCon London (https://qconlondon.com) and QCon San Francisco (https://qconsf.com).

## FAQ

**What is an InfoQ online cohort?**
A five-week live online program where senior engineers and software architects apply frameworks from QCon talks to decisions they are working on at work, alongside peers from other companies. Four hours of live sessions a week, plus up to two hours of homework. It ends in an InfoQ certification.

**Who is it for?**
Senior software practitioners with at least five years of experience who are involved in setting technical strategy. Titles vary by cohort and include senior, staff, and principal engineers, software architects, technical leads, engineering managers, and engineering directors.

**Are the sessions recorded?**
No. This is deliberate. Sessions stay unrecorded so participants can talk about live decisions, real constraints, and honest views of their own organizations in confidence.

**What happens if I miss a session?**
Participants are expected to attend at least four of the five live sessions, and attendance is one of the certification criteria. If you miss one, you can catch up through the private Slack channel, review the session materials and slides in the shared Google Drive folder, complete that week's homework, and ask questions in Slack.

**What do I need to take part?**
A stable high-speed internet connection, the current Zoom desktop client, access to the private Slack workspace, and a laptop or desktop. Mobile devices work but a computer is strongly recommended for the collaborative exercises. The AI-Assisted Engineering cohort also requires your own coding-agent access.

**How do I earn the certification?**
Consistent attendance and active participation in the live sessions, plus successful completion of the capstone.

**What is the capstone?**
In most cohorts, working groups co-author a technical article of 2,000 to 3,000 words applying what the cohort covered, presented in week 5, with the best published on InfoQ. The AI-Assisted Engineering cohort is different: participants submit a harnessed brownfield repository, a codified rule or agent skill, and a measurement write-up.

**Why a cohort instead of watching the talks?**
Because the work is defending the trade-offs in your own context. Hearing how engineers in other companies and industries think through the same decision is often as useful as the session content. The cohorts are built around a confidential peer group, live exercises, and facilitation by a working practitioner, rather than self-paced study.

**Is this just another course?**
The program assumes deep technical expertise already. Each week is built around a decision you are working on, not a case study. The focus is on the skills that are hardest to get from inside one organization: testing decisions with peers, articulating trade-offs to stakeholders, and making calls that are difficult to reverse.

**How much does it cost, and will my employer pay?**
USD1,470 per cohort. Most companies reimburse for professional development, and there is a template to send a manager at https://certification.qconferences.com/content/convince-your-boss

**Can I get a refund?**
Registration fees are not refundable.

**Do you run cohorts in person?**
Yes, at selected QCon conferences, including QCon London and QCon San Francisco.

**Who runs the program?**
C4Media Inc., the team behind InfoQ and QCon. QCon and InfoQ are trademarked and wholly owned brands of C4Media Inc., based in Canada.

## What graduates say

"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

## Links

- All cohorts: https://certification.qconferences.com/
- AI Security & Privacy Engineering: https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-security-privacy
- Architecture: https://certification.qconferences.com/architecture
- Engineering Leadership: https://certification.qconferences.com/engineering-leadership
- AI-Assisted Engineering: https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-assisted-engineering
- AI Engineering: https://certification.qconferences.com/ai-engineering
- Syllabuses: https://certification.qconferences.com/content/online-cohort-syllabuses
- Convince your manager template: https://certification.qconferences.com/content/convince-your-boss
- FAQ: https://certification.qconferences.com/#faq
- Terms of participation: https://certification.qconferences.com/terms-conditions
- Code of Conduct: https://certification.qconferences.com/code-conduct
- Privacy notice: https://qconferences.com/privacy-notice
- InfoQ certification program and published capstone articles: https://www.infoq.com/infoq-certification-program/
- Published ICSAET capstone articles: https://www.infoq.com/architecture-icsaet/
- Waitlist: https://certification.qconferences.com/#cohorts-subscribe

## Related events

- QCon San Francisco: November 16–18, 2026 (conference), plus separate training days November 19–20, 2026, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco. https://qconsf.com
- QCon AI New York: December 15–16, 2026, The Westin Jersey City Newport. https://ai.qconferences.com
- QCon London: April 13–15, 2027 (conference), plus a separate ICSAET certification training day on April 16, 2027, The QEII Centre, London. https://qconlondon.com
- All InfoQ and QCon events: https://events.infoq.com/

## About InfoQ and QCon

More than 1 million people read InfoQ every month, and 4,500+ attend QCon and InfoQ Dev Summit each year. InfoQ is a practitioner-driven community news site covering professional software development. QCon and InfoQ have given every major technology shift the same practitioner-led treatment for more than 20 years, with sessions chosen for technical depth and real production experience. The online certification cohorts apply that approach in a small-group format over five weeks.

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