SREcon26 Americas Call for Participation

Overview

Join us in Seattle, WA, USA, as we gather to discuss a variety of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) topics. This year we look to explore convergence—the merging of distinct technologies, industries, or devices into a unified whole. The last several years have seen disruption and fragmentation as new technologies were introduced, changes in the employment terms, the rise of software dependence for many of society's critical functions, and an evolution in how organizations operate large-scale distributed systems.

The explosion of Generative AI and the integration of those capabilities into the workflow have changed the nature of software development and site reliability engineering in ways that have yet to form a unified whole. Some question whether this is even possible.

The introduction of Platform Engineering (PE) and the co-existence of PE and SRE have yet to be defined. These roles overlap but how they coordinate effectively and distribute responsibilities is not always clear. How these roles work together as the disciplines evolve is an important area of interest.

The return to office mandates changed patterns of work between people and new processes have emerged to handle the increasing importance of software in everyday life for critical functions in finance, healthcare, and aviation amongst other fields.

This year we ask: How can we know if we are moving towards convergence or still riding out the waves of disruption? We welcome contributions that describe, examine, analyze, provide guidance, or make predictions around convergence in SRE operations that center on the above topics.

Systems Engineering/Principles

Along with exploring our theme of convergence, SREcon26 Americas will host a track dedicated to explaining the technical underpinnings of the systems and infrastructure with which we work. Talks on these subjects should focus on providing a deeper understanding of how key technologies used in large-scale distributed systems work: their architecture, their strengths and their sharp edges, and new developments. These are the details you need when designing, supporting, and scaling your infrastructure. Talks that deal with applying theory to practice are particularly welcome.

We seek proposals on a number of topics such as:

• Performance: OS-level techniques for optimization, overcoming bottlenecks, performance measurement, performance topics related to common systems SREs use.
• Databases: deep-dives on your DBMS of choice, new databases for emerging data types and use cases relevant to SREs.
• Observability: building and scaling infrastructure for monitoring, understanding events vs. metrics, visualizations, systems to support debugging at scale, OpenTelemetry.
• Distributed Systems: consistency and consensus, Kafka and other distributed logs, distributed applied use of Big Data tools in a SRE or business context.
• Networking: New approaches to getting traffic to your application, across all layers of the OSI model.
• Security: SREs often end up working on platform security. What novel approaches to securing data at rest, in use, and in transit have you encountered?

Other Topics

We always welcome submissions on all topics relevant to both the human side and the technical aspects of software operations, availability, and reliability. If you have an idea for an innovative talk, please submit!

Talk Proposals

• 15-minute talks with an additional 5 minutes for Q&A
• 35-minute talks with an additional 10 minutes for Q&A

Lightning Talks

• We are accepting proposals for 4-minute Lightning Talks on any topic related to the practice of Site Reliability Engineering. Each selected talk should have exactly 16 slides, auto-advancing to the next slide every 15 seconds. The time limit is strict, so make sure that you have only one core idea for your talk. Talk proposal submissions are due on February 11. Slides for selected Lightning Talks are due on March 12, so that they can be run centrally.

Participant Information

SREcon participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds: small startups, tech giants with tens of thousands of employees, finance, and enterprise sector companies adopting or expanding SRE in their organizations, and academia. New speakers are encouraged to submit talks; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share, and the previous year most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and learn from.

We welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country. We also welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, customer experience/support, security teams, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, health care professionals, scientists, and economists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon26 Americas.

Speaker Information

To see the details of what we want to know about your proposal to speak, we encourage you to visit the talks submission system.

Please note that we make use of a two-phase submission process: Phase 1 provides details needed for the program committee to pick the best content. Phase 2 is where you provide your personal information and the short description for the program agenda. Only accepted and waitlisted proposals will proceed through Phase 2; that information must be provided by December 18, 2025.

Both presenters and organizers may withdraw or decline proposals for any reason, even after initial acceptance. Speakers must submit their own proposals; third-party submissions, even if authorized, will be rejected.

If you have questions about this Call for Participation, feel free to drop us a message at [email protected]. If you are a new presenter or would just like some extra help, please reach out. We are happy to provide support.

SREcon26 Americas is scheduled to be held in Seattle, WA, USA, on March 24–26, 2026.

Background

SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. Our purpose is to be inclusive as we bring together ideas representative of our diverse community, whether its members are focusing on a global scale, launching new products and ideas for a small business, or pivoting their approach to unite software and systems engineering. SREcon challenges both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in SRE or related endeavors for years. The conference culture is built upon respectful collaboration amongst all participants in the community through critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation.

For more information on the themes and programs of past conferences, see the list of past conferences.