Rootconf
Rootconf

Rootconf 2026 Annual Conference

Call for Proposals

Rootconf 2026 Annual Conference Call for Proposals

13-14 November 2026

Rootconf 2026 Annual Conference is looking for talks, demos, workshops, discussions, and stories from people building, operating, scaling, securing, observing, and evolving modern platforms.

This year, we are especially interested in the intersection of platform engineering and AI, but the conference is not limited to AI-only work. We want to understand what platform teams are dealing with right now: the systems they are building, the operational problems they are solving, the failures they are learning from, and the new practices they are testing in production.

Direction of Rootconf 2026 Annual Conference

Rootconf 2026 will explore two connected questions.

  • First, how are platforms changing to support AI systems?
    This includes infrastructure for inference, model serving, agents, observability, security, governance, token costs, deployment workflows, and enterprise concerns around reliability and control.

  • Second, how is AI changing the practice of platform engineering?
    This includes AI-assisted operations, agents for observability or incident response, automation for deployments and rollbacks, security workflows, developer platforms, and experiments where teams are using AI to improve engineering systems.

We also welcome strong proposals on core platform engineering topics that may not be AI-led. Reliability, observability, databases, infrastructure, security, scalability, internal developer platforms, cost, automation, and operations remain central to Rootconf.

The final tracks will be shaped after we review the submissions. We are keeping the CFP open so the program can reflect the strongest work, rather than forcing talks into a theme too early.

Topics we are interested in

You can submit work related to, but not limited to:

  • Platforms for AI systems
  • Inference operations and model serving
  • Running AI workloads in production
  • Observability for AI systems, agents, and platform workflows
  • Guardrails, governance, compliance, and security for AI-enabled systems
  • FinOps for AI, including token costs and infrastructure costs
  • Enterprise approaches to self-hosted or internally managed AI systems
  • AI tools for SRE, DevOps, security, platform engineering, and developer experience
  • Agents for deployment, rollback, debugging, incident response, or operational workflows
  • Infrastructure, scalability, latency, and reliability stories
  • Databases, queues, distributed systems, and storage in platform contexts
  • Internal developer platforms and platform product thinking
  • Kubernetes, orchestration, operators, automation, and runtime platforms
  • Security, policy, access control, and sandboxing
  • Failure stories, migrations, tradeoffs, and hard lessons from production
  • Work in progress that would benefit from feedback or collaborators

If your work sits between domains, that is welcome. We are especially interested in talks that connect technical depth with practical experience.

Presentation formats

We welcome different formats, including:

  • Technical talks
  • Case studies
  • War stories
  • Failure stories
  • Live demos
  • Project showcases
  • Work in progress sessions
  • Birds of Feather discussions
  • Workshops
  • Lightning talks

A proposal does not need to describe a finished or polished product. If you are working on something interesting, stuck on a hard problem, or experimenting with a new approach, we would like to hear from you.

For demos and showcases, we are looking for concrete examples rather than product pitches. Show us what was built, what problem it solved, what broke, what changed, and what others can learn from it.

Meet the Editors

Who should consider speaking

You should consider submitting a proposal if you are:

  • Building or operating platforms, infrastructure, developer tooling, or production systems
  • Working in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, MLOps, security, data infrastructure, or adjacent roles
  • Exploring how AI is changing platform work or how platforms need to support AI systems
  • Responsible for reliability, observability, cost, deployment, governance, or scale
  • Working across teams and domains to make systems easier to build and run
  • Carrying a useful lesson from a migration, incident, architecture decision, experiment, or failure

You do not need to have all the answers. Rootconf values grounded stories, honest tradeoffs, and useful details.

Why present at Rootconf

As a presenter, you get to:

  • Share real engineering work with a technical audience that cares about substance
  • Find peers working on similar problems
  • Receive feedback from practitioners across companies and domains
  • Make your work visible beyond your immediate team or organization
  • Help shape how the platform engineering community understands new and emerging practices
  • Contribute to a conference program built around practical learning rather than generic trend talk

For demos and showcases, Rootconf can be a place to find collaborators, users, reviewers, and people who can challenge or improve your thinking.

Who should attend

Rootconf 2026 is for people who build, run, depend on, or make decisions about engineering platforms.

You should consider attending if you are:

  • A platform engineer, SRE, DevOps engineer, infrastructure engineer, security engineer, MLOps engineer, data infrastructure engineer, or engineering leader
  • Building internal platforms or developer tooling
  • Evaluating how AI affects infrastructure, operations, observability, security, or cost
  • Looking for practical stories from teams running systems in production
  • Interested in learning from failures, tradeoffs, and implementation details
  • Looking to meet practitioners working on similar problems

Why attend

Attendees can expect:

  • Practical sessions from people doing the work
  • Concrete use cases, demos, and implementation stories
  • A view into how platform teams are responding to AI without losing sight of core engineering concerns
  • Honest discussion of failures, risks, costs, and operational realities
  • Opportunities to meet peers, discover projects, and exchange ideas
  • A program shaped by the quality and diversity of submissions, not by a narrow predefined track structure

Next steps

Submit your proposal through the CFP form - https://hasgeek.com/rootconf/2026-cfp/cfp

After submissions begin coming in, the editors team will review the quality, range, and direction of proposals before finalizing tracks and session formats.

Shortlisted speakers may be asked to share additional details or draft material before the final program is confirmed. This helps us keep the conference useful, practical, and technically grounded.

We look forward to hearing what you are building, breaking, learning, and rethinking.

Deadline

Send in your proposal by 9 October 2026 at the latest.

Questions?

Write to info@hasgeek.com or call/text 7676332020.

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