Three InfoQ Certification Cohorts Start This August: Meet the Facilitators

InfoQ has opened enrollment for three five-week online certification cohorts starting in August: Architecture with Luca Mezzalira, starting August 13; Engineering Leadership with Michelle Brush, starting August 21; and AI Security & Privacy Engineering with Katharine Jarmul, starting August 26. Each cohort is limited to practitioners with at least five years of experience, and live sessions run for four hours a week.

Senior engineers and architects making architecture, leadership, or AI security decisions are often the most senior person in the room, with few outside voices to check their thinking. Each week, participants take a framework from a QCon talk and apply it to a real decision from their own work, then discuss what worked, what failed, and what's still uncertain with a confidential peer group of senior engineers and architects from other companies.

Architecture, with Luca Mezzalira (starts August 13)

Luca Mezzalira is the author of Building Micro-Frontends (O'Reilly) and creator of the "Dear Architects" newsletter. His cohort, the InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies program, covers the sociotechnical side of the job: trade-offs and how to communicate them, decentralized decision-making, platform engineering, and architecture decisions for AI systems. Full details and registration are on the Architecture cohort page.

Engineering Leadership, with Michelle Brush (starts August 21)

Michelle Brush is an Engineering Director for SRE at Google, where she keeps Compute Engine and Persistent Disk reliable. She previously led architecture at Cerner and engineered Garmin's automotive routing algorithm, and wrote two chapters of 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. Her cohort works through the decisions behind leading technical work: organizational foundations, technical strategy, execution, measurement, accountability, and the long-term cost of running what teams build. Full details and registration are on the Engineering Leadership cohort page.

AI Security and Privacy Engineering, with Katharine Jarmul (starts August 26)

Katharine Jarmul wrote Practical Data Privacy (O'Reilly), now published in three languages, and gave the opening keynote at InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025. She has spent about a decade in machine learning, roughly eight years of it focused on privacy and security. Her cohort is built for teams shipping AI in regulated industries and covers sensitive data handling in AI workflows, threat modeling and red teaming, controls and sandboxes, observability and evaluations, and governance and auditing. Full details and registration are on the AI Security & Privacy Engineering cohort page.

Participants work in small groups across the five weeks toward a capstone due in week five. The Architecture cohort's capstone is a strategic article; the AI Security & Privacy cohort's is a documented risk assessment and mitigation report for an AI product architecture. The strongest capstones from each cohort are published on InfoQ.

Each program costs USD 1,470 per cohort, and most companies reimburse professional development. A "convince your boss" template is available for anyone who needs to request approval. 

A fourth cohort opens first: AI Engineering, facilitated by Hien Luu, author of MLOps with Ray, starts July 25.

Full syllabi, pricing, and registration for all five programs are on the InfoQ Online Certification Programs hub.