As technical practitioners move into senior, staff, or principal roles, the number of people inside their organization who can challenge their reasoning often gets smaller. The decisions they are asked to make also become harder to reverse: architectural boundaries, platform strategy, AI infrastructure, team design, and the trade-offs behind long-term technical direction.
InfoQ’s Online Certification Programs are expanding around that problem. The cohorts are designed to give senior engineers, architects, technical leads, and engineering managers a confidential peer group where they can apply frameworks from QCon talks to real decisions from their own work, alongside practitioners from other companies and contexts.
The latest addition is the InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program, a production AI-focused cohort for senior practitioners working on RAG, agents, AI platforms, evals, and reliability.
InfoQ has also launched the InfoQ Certified Organizational Architect Program, covering the organizational decisions that shape how engineering work gets done, team structure, value stream design, and platform strategy.
These cohorts join the existing InfoQ online certification portfolio, which already includes the Certified Architect Program.
A Shared Cohort Format
The format is designed for practitioners who already have deep technical experience. The emphasis is not on introductory instruction, but on making better decisions in areas where the trade-offs are difficult to reverse.
Across all programs, each week follows the same practical, five-week structure:
- Independent preparation: Participants watch a curated QCon talk on their own time before the session.
- Live workshop: Participants join a weekly, four-hour live workshop with the facilitator and a senior peer group.
- Real-world application: The group applies the framework to an active decision from the participant’s own work, discussing trade-offs in a confidential peer setting.
- Apply at work: Participants leave with an approach, framing, or trade-off analysis they can use with their team that week.
The cohorts give participants a way to compare approaches with senior peers from different industries, validate decisions they are already making, and improve how they articulate trade-offs to stakeholders.
Upcoming online cohorts and certifications
Software Architecture
Dives into the sociotechnical side of architecture. Topics include distributed systems and resilience patterns, decentralized architectural decision-making, platform engineering, and integrating AI into architecture practice.
- Facilitator: Luca Mezzalira, Principal Solutions Architect and O'Reilly author of Building Micro-Frontends.
- Starts: Wednesday, June 10. Choice of BST or EDT cohorts.
- Syllabus: View the full week-by-week overview.
Starts June 10, 2026. Reserve your place.
Organizational Architect (New)
This cohort is exploring the non-technical decisions that shape whether the technical strategy gets adopted. Topics include leadership communication, value stream architecture, architecting for flow, platformization, and managing cognitive load.
- Facilitator: Manuel Pais, Co-author of Team Topologies and Director of the Team Topologies Academy.
- Starts: Friday, June 19, 2026, at 9:00 AM CEST.
- Syllabus: View the full week-by-week overview.
Starts June 19, 2026. Reserve your place.
AI Engineering (New)
Focuses on building AI systems that hold up in production. Topics include AI-native engineering, RAG and context pipelines, agent design, AI platform infrastructure, inference cost, and system reliability.
- Facilitator: Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager at Zoox and author of MLOps with Ray and Beginning Apache Spark 3.
- Starts: Saturday, July 25, 2026, at 09:00 AM PDT.
- Syllabus: View the full week-by-week overview.
Starts July 25, 2026. Reserve your place.
Program Details
The cohorts require a weekly commitment of four hours of live session time, plus up to two hours of time-boxed homework.
Most companies reimburse professional development. InfoQ provides Convince Your Boss templates for participants who need to explain the value of the cohort internally.
New topics are added over the coming weeks. If these don't quite match your current focus, feel free to check out our full lineup. Explore all upcoming cohorts.