Inaugural 250-seat single-track technical conference on reliability engineering for AI-powered systems, held at Kulturbrauerei Berlin on September 10-11 2026 (welcome reception September 9). The programme covers AI observability, LLMOps, agentic coding and SRE for AI systems, with speakers from Anthropic, Zalando, Honeycomb, Bloomberg and Booking.com. Tickets from EUR 499.
Signals Conference is a curated technical conference on "reliability in the age of AI," aimed at engineers working at the intersection of site reliability engineering, AI systems and ML operations. The 2026 edition is the first, held at Kulturbrauerei Berlin (Kesselhaus and Palais rooms), a 19th-century industrial brewery complex in the Prenzlauer Berg district. With a deliberate cap of 250 seats and a single-track format, Signals positions itself as a practitioner-to-practitioner forum rather than a broadcast conference: no exhibition floor, no sponsor keynotes. The programme opens with a welcome reception on September 9 and runs for two full days on September 10-11. It sits within the developer and AI engineering circuit tracked by Events Index.
The programme is built around the engineering problems that surface when AI systems have to meet production reliability requirements. The organiser frames the premise directly: AI-assisted development is changing how systems are designed, implemented, reviewed and maintained, and AI-heavy components in production bring new observability challenges, new operational complexity and new failure patterns. Sessions span:
The Call for Participation, now closed, invited field reports, emerging patterns, conceptual models and honest lessons from practitioners in SRE, platform engineering, DevOps, MLOps and data engineering, including work in progress and unresolved questions grounded in real practice.
Signals grew out of a specific moment: at SREcon Dublin in 2025, Heinrich Hartmann argued that reliability engineering needed a dedicated venue for the questions AI was starting to raise in production. The conference is the answer to that argument. Hartmann has been working in reliability engineering for roughly a decade and is a Senior Principal SRE at Zalando; he also delivered "The Frontiers of Reliability Engineering" at SREcon24 EMEA, a talk that maps the same territory Signals is built to cover. The result is a conference designed by a practitioner for practitioners, with the format choices (single track, 250 seats, no vendor keynotes) following directly from that intent.
Full speaker list at signalsconf.io.
The 2026 edition is supported by a tiered sponsor structure focused on observability, reliability and AI-tooling vendors rather than general technology brands:
Consistent with the practitioner-first format, sponsors do not receive keynote slots or an exhibition floor. Engineers comparing adjacent production-AI and reliability events on the circuit also track AI in Production 2026, AI Native DevCon, and, for the broader ML tooling audience in the same city, MLCon Berlin 2026.
As an inaugural 250-seat event, Signals Conference has not yet generated attributable coverage in named technology or business outlets, and no journalist accreditation figures are published. This is expected for a first-edition, single-track conference deliberately capped below the scale that draws trade-press attention; treating the absence of coverage as a data point rather than a gap, the event's visibility so far runs through practitioner channels rather than media.
Two verifiable reference points anchor the conference's credibility in place of press pickup. First, its origin is documented on the record: Heinrich Hartmann's SREcon Dublin 2025 remarks on the need for a reliability-and-AI venue are the stated genesis of Signals. Second, Hartmann's SREcon24 EMEA talk "The Frontiers of Reliability Engineering" is published by USENIX and sets out the subject matter the conference addresses. Coverage of the first edition, if it materialises, would most plausibly come from SRE and observability community channels rather than general business media; this fiche will be updated when named coverage appears.
Signals occupies a specific intersection: it addresses engineers who already understand SRE practices and are now responsible for AI-powered systems. The content assumes SRE foundations and focuses on what changes when AI replaces or augments deterministic code, covering observability challenges, failure-mode characterisation, evaluation frameworks, and LLMOps practices.
LLMOps (Large Language Model Operations) is the discipline of deploying, monitoring, versioning and maintaining LLM-based systems in production. It extends MLOps to the specific challenges of LLMs: prompt management, output evaluation, hallucination monitoring, latency and cost. Signals treats LLMOps as a reliability engineering concern rather than a data-science one.
The 250-seat cap is a design choice, not a logistics constraint. A single-track format at this scale keeps the whole audience in the same room for the same talks, which favours depth and hallway conversation over parallel-track breadth. It follows from the organiser's stated intent to build a practitioner-to-practitioner forum rather than a broadcast event with an exhibition floor.
The programme assumes SRE familiarity. Attendees new to SRE and looking for foundational reliability engineering content would benefit more from SREcon or similar introductory resources first, then return to Signals for the AI-specific material.
Kulturbrauerei is a 19th-century industrial brewery complex in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, converted into a cultural and event venue. The conference uses the Kesselhaus and Palais rooms. Address: Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin. From Berlin Hauptbahnhof: U-Bahn U2 to Eberswalder Strasse (approximately 25 minutes) or S-Bahn to Prenzlauer Allee. From Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER): S-Bahn to Ostkreuz, then S41/S42 ring to Prenzlauer Allee (approximately 45 minutes).
Signals Conference is organised by Heinrich Hartmann through Hartmann IT GmbH. The conference reflects a practitioner-first philosophy: small scale, high density, technical depth, no exhibition floor and no sponsor keynotes. Hartmann is a Senior Principal SRE at Zalando with roughly a decade in reliability engineering, and he moderates a panel on the 2026 programme in addition to running the event. The organiser's editorial control over a single track is what lets the conference hold a consistent line on its "reliability in the age of AI" theme across both days.
Signals Conference is a curated 250-seat reliability engineering conference in Berlin focused on AI system reliability, occupying a distinct position between established SRE practice and the emerging LLMOps discipline. Its inaugural 2026 edition is worth tracking less for scale than for signal: a Zalando Senior Principal SRE convening named practitioners from Anthropic, Honeycomb, Bloomberg and Booking.com around production AI reliability is an early marker of how the SRE field is absorbing AI, alongside other fixtures of the developer and AI engineering circuit.
Tickets start at EUR 499 (June early rate) plus VAT, covering both conference days, all sessions, meals, drinks and the September 9 welcome reception. The standard rate is EUR 600 plus VAT. Discounts are available on request for students, startups and self-funded individuals via tickets@signalsconf.io. Register at signalsconf.io.
Address: Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg. U-Bahn: U2 to Eberswalder Strasse (10-minute walk). S-Bahn: S41/S42 ring to Prenzlauer Allee (5-minute walk). From Berlin Hauptbahnhof: U-Bahn U2 approximately 25 minutes.
The welcome reception takes place on September 9 at the Zalando BHW office in Berlin, a separate location from the main conference venue at Kulturbrauerei. The ticket covers both conference days (September 10-11), all sessions, meals, drinks and this reception.
Yes. Discounts are offered on request for students, startups and self-funded individuals. Requests go to tickets@signalsconf.io rather than through an automated checkout tier.
Recording availability is not confirmed at the time of verification. Given the single-track format, any recordings would cover the full programme rather than selected tracks. Check signalsconf.io after the event.
| Official website | https://signalsconf.io/ |
| Register | https://signalsconf.io/ |
| Call for Participation | https://signalsconf.io/cfp/ |
| Developer and AI circuit (Events Index) | /developer-ai.html |
| Upcoming EMEA events (Events Index) | /upcoming.html |