Production AI and Engineering Team Design: InfoQ’s November Certification Cohorts

The November 17 cohort for the InfoQ Certified High-Performing Teams Program will be led by Olimpiu Pop, who brings 20 years of experience across technology leadership, engineering management, and software architecture.

InfoQ has released details for three online certification cohorts launching this November 2026. These programs delve into various facets of engineering work, covering topics such as agent orchestration, reliable retrieval, delivery dependencies, AI roles, and performance measurement.

Adi Polak will guide the November 12 cohort focusing on AI Engineering. Her curriculum incorporates QCon material on context engineering, comparing vector retrieval against Graph RAG, and exploring how agents manage shared state and context.

Lan Chu facilitates the November 13 cohort, drawing from her QCon London case study involving a RAG system serving over 300 people using more than 10,000 documents. Her work involves tracing indexing and retrieval decisions and evaluating multi-agent versus single-agent designs.

The InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program addresses complex AI application decisions, such as the risk of stale context from retrieval, the control needed for autonomous agents, and ownership questions arising from shared AI infrastructure.

The High-Performing Teams program examines how introducing AI agents shifts accountability, who prepares context, and who reviews output within a team operating model.

Each cohort follows its facilitator's unique syllabus, rather than using a standardized set of exercises. Participants engage in live online sessions with their facilitator to discuss constraints when applying new material to current engineering challenges.

Certification requires successful completion of the relevant capstone and consistent participation. These cohorts gather senior architects and engineers from various organizations to apply knowledge from QCon talks to their daily development decisions.