GraphQLConf 2026: Full Schedule

May 19 - 20 | In-Person Only
GraphQLConf 2026 website

The Sched app allows you to build your schedule but you must also be registered for GraphQLConf 2026 to participate in the sessions.

Please note: This schedule is automatically displayed in Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). To see the schedule in your preferred timezone, please select from the drop-down located at the bottom of the menu to the right.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

arrow_back View All Dates

8:00am PDT

Registration + Badge Pick-up

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:00pm PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:00pm PDT
Foyer

Registration + Badge Pick-up

8:00am PDT

Solutions Showcase

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:30pm PDT

Foyer

In order to facilitate networking and business relationships at the event, you may choose to visit a third party’s booth or access sponsored content. You are never required to visit third party booths or to access sponsored content. When visiting a booth or participating in sponsored activities, the third party will receive some of your registration data. This data includes your first name, last name, title, company, address, email, standard demographics questions (i.e. job function, industry), and details about the sponsored content or resources you interacted with. If you choose to interact with a booth or access sponsored content, you are explicitly consenting to receipt and use of such data by the third-party recipients, which will be subject to their own privacy policies.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 8:00am - 5:30pm PDT
Foyer

Solutions Showcase

9:00am PDT

GraphQL All Hands Meeting

Wednesday May 20, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Help shape the future of GraphQL! Join GraphQL Foundation Board Members, TSC Members, and other community leaders for a public meeting about goals and priorities for 2027, and help us celebrate 2026's wins.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 9:00am - 10:00am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

All Hands Meeting

10:00am PDT

Break

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

10:15am PDT

Lightning Talk: GraphQLShield: CWE-Aware Defense in Depth for GraphQL APIs in Go - Ravi Sastry Kadali, Open Source Contributor

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL APIs face a unique threat landscape: deeply nested queries cause resource exhaustion, introspection exposes entire schemas, and mutation variables carry injection payloads past traditional WAFs. Yet most Go-based GraphQL servers ship with zero security middleware between HTTP and resolver execution.

I introduce GraphQLShield, an open-source Go middleware bringing defense-in-depth to GraphQL APIs through three layers: (1) Static schema analysis detecting cyclic types, missing depth limits, and sensitive field exposure before deployment; (2) Runtime CWE-aware input sanitization catching SQL injection, XSS, command injection, path traversal, and NoSQL injection in GraphQL variables — bridging go-safeinput’s MITRE CWE Top 25 coverage to GraphQL; and (3) Resolver code auditing inspired by gosec and cryptoguard-go flagging insecure crypto, hardcoded secrets, and missing auth checks.

A quick demo shows GraphQLShield intercepting 7 attack vectors against a gqlgen API, from SQL injection in mutation variables to depth-based DoS, while legitimate requests pass cleanly. Attendees leave with a zero-dependency Go library covering 14 CWE vulnerability classes across static and runtime analysis.

Speakers

Ravi Sastry Kadali

Go Ecosystem Contributor & Security Engineer, Open Source Contributor

Ravi Sastry Kadali is a security and systems engineer with over 20 years of experience building production infrastructure across defense, enterprise, and hyperscale consumer platforms — with Go as his tool of choice. He is a contributor to the Go project itself (golang/go), with... Read More →

graphqlshield RaviSastryKadali GraphQLConf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:25am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

When GraphQL Gets Expensive: Performance & Cost Patterns in Production Serverless Architectures - Harpreet Siddhu, AWS Community Builder & Shravanth Gowda Venkatesh, Independent Researcher

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

GraphQL simplifies client development through flexible, expressive data queries. However, in serverless production environments, that flexibility can quietly increase latency and infrastructure cost.

In AWS-based architectures using Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, and distributed services, resolver design and query structure directly impact execution time, cold starts, and overall spend. Unlike REST, GraphQL shifts cost dynamics to query complexity and resolver fan-out, and often in ways teams don’t anticipate until production traffic scales.

This session examines common performance and cost anti-patterns in serverless GraphQL systems, including N+1 resolver cascades, unbounded query depth, over-fetching, and inefficient resolver fan-out. We’ll explore how these patterns affect Lambda duration, concurrency, and downstream data stores.

Attendees will learn practical mitigation strategies such as batching with DataLoader, caching and persisted queries, query complexity limits, schema guardrails, and observability techniques to detect bottlenecks early.

Speakers

Harpreet Siddhu

Lead Software Engineer, AWS Community Builder

Harpreet Siddhu is a Lead Software Engineer and AWS Certified Solution Architect, Developer, and CloudOps engineer, AWS community Builder, and AWS road to re:Invent hackathon Champion and with over a decade of experience designing and modernizing cloud-native systems. He specializes... Read More →

Shravanth Venkatesh

AWS Solutions Architect, Independent Researcher

Shravanth is a AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Principal Software Engineer with 8+ years designing and scaling production systems on AWS. Leading teams shipping serverless healthcare platforms across AWS, he saw firsthand how GraphQL's flexibility quietly reshapes cost and performance... Read More →

graphql conf pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Performance

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:15am PDT

Screens on Shuffle: How Netflix Scales Server‑Driven, Ever‑Changing Pages - Sreekanth Ramakrishnan, Netflix

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT

Boardroom

How do you power a product where every page layout, module, and slice of content can change daily—across hundreds of millions of devices—without shipping a new client every time? In this talk, we’ll dive into how Netflix evolved its GraphQL APIs from traditional “data fetching” into a server‑driven UI platform, enabling rapid product innovation and page updates without requiring app releases across a massive device ecosystem. We’ll walk through the architecture that lets servers describe dynamic page structure and behavior, how those contracts scale across many product surfaces and experiments, and the performance and reliability lessons we learned operating this at Netflix scale. When we built this system, we found almost no public examples of similar patterns, so this session is intentionally practical: we’ll share concrete schema patterns, client rendering strategies, and tips you can apply to your own feeds, homepages, and highly dynamic experiences—whether you’re working at Netflix scale or just starting to stretch GraphQL beyond CRUD.

Speakers

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan

Senior Software Engineer, Netflix

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan is a Senior Software Engineer on the Member API team at Netflix, where he works on systems that power dynamic, real-time experiences in Netflix pages across devices worldwide. He focuses on GraphQL, distributed systems, and server-driven UI architecture. Prior... Read More →

Screens on Shuffle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:15am - 10:40am PDT
Boardroom

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:30am PDT

Lightning Talk: The @deprecated Journey: Five Stops From Schema Hint To Gateway Power - Nasser Abouelazm, Bloomberg

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

@deprecated is usually treated as a client-facing hint. However, in federated GraphQL, it can evolve into a set of patterns that shape governance, runtime behavior, observability, and even gateway planning. In this lightning talk, I’ll take @deprecated on a five-stop journey across the federation lifecycle — 1) schema hint, 2) schema shaping, 3) runtime feedback, 4) client-aware telemetry, and 5) gateway power. I’ll close with a brief developer experience bonus — how structured deprecation metadata can feed code-gen/IDE tooling to suggest non-deprecated alternatives while queries are being written. The goal of the talk is to share a practical mental model and guardrails for keeping large federated graphs evolvable, observable, and safe.

Speakers

Nasser Abouelazm

Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg

A middle school teacher turned web developer, Nasser Abouelazm has always embraced the art of building epic and engaging experiences that delight, educate, and enchant a broad audience of users. As a senior full-stack engineer working to support Bloomberg Media, he is focused on developing... Read More →

Nasser the deprecated journey GraphQLConf26 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:30am - 10:40am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

GraphQL Meets LLMs & Agents: Building Production AI at Starbucks Scale - Sharon Gorla, Starbucks

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL isn't just an API technology—it's the perfect foundation for AI agents and LLM-powered applications. At Starbucks, we built GraphQL platforms at massive scale (180M+ queries/day, 10,000 stores, 31M+ app users) before GenAI became mainstream. Now, as we explore AI integration, we're discovering that GraphQL provides fundamental advantages for AI that are impossible with REST.

This talk explores the AI systems we're building on our existing GraphQL infrastructure:

In-store AI assistant (planned for Order Engine GraphQL BFF)
Mobile/web AI platform (exploring on Apollo Supergraph)
On-call automation using Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
You'll learn how GraphQL reduces AI token costs by 75x, enables zero-configuration AI tool discovery, provides built-in guardrails through type systems, and why federation is the perfect architecture for enterprise AI agents. Real demos, proven patterns, lessons from building GraphQL at scale.

Speakers

Sharon Gorla

Engineer Lead, Starbucks

I’m an engineering leader with 16+ years of experience driving digital transformation, modernizing systems, and building high-performing teams. At Starbucks, I'm lead engineer for Next‑Gen POS modernization, earned a U.S. patent, and founded the GraphQL Community of Practice... Read More →

GraphQL Meets LLMs Final pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

Modern Apollo Client React - Brennen Davis, Lease End

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Use Apollo Client v4 in React with Tanstack Router.

We’ll be using GraphQL code generation from your schema, preloading data at the router level, optmistic updates, and using Apollo’s cache to eliminate unnecessary refetching and rerenders. You’ll see how smart cache usage and colocating queries lets components read data directly where they need it which will reduce prop drilling. The goal is to show how “modern” Apollo Client patterns fit naturally into today’s React architecture to create apps that feel both simpler to reason about and noticeably more performant.

Speakers

Brennen Davis

Principal Software Engineer, Lease End

Husband to a beautiful wife and a dad to 2 boys. Video games and programming

apollo client v4 brennen davis pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:50am PDT

Sponsored Panel Discussion: The GraphQL Production Roundtable - Aileen Chen, Airbnb; Clarice Abreu, Brex; Stephen Spalding, Netflix; Moderated by Jory Burson, The Linux Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Large engineering organizations now run GraphQL at the center of their product stacks, serving billions of requests across web, mobile, and internal clients. The questions have shifted accordingly. The interesting problems are no longer about whether to adopt GraphQL, or how to write a resolver. They are about what it takes to operate GraphQL reliably, evolve it safely, and scale the humans who work on it.

This panel brings together engineers from companies running GraphQL in production at large scale to compare notes on the realities of that work. Each panelist has spent years operating a GraphQL gateway or federated graph that fronts hundreds of services and thousands of fields, owned by dozens of teams. The goal of the session is a candid, technical conversation about what has worked, what has not, and what they would do differently.

This session is intended for engineers and tech leads who already run GraphQL in production or are planning to, and who want to hear from peers operating at similar or larger scale. Familiarity with GraphQL fundamentals is assumed. No introductory material will be covered.

Speakers

Stephen Spalding

Engineer, Netflix

Stephen is a member of the Edge API team at Netflix and a member of the GraphQL TSC. His team develops and operates the Netflix API platform. This is the nexus point where hundreds of microservices are aggregated into a single API that delivers the Netflix experience for the hundreds... Read More →

Jory Burson

VP of Standards, The Linux Foundation

Jory Burson is the VP of Standards for the Linux Foundation, where she helps projects identify opportunities for standardization and collaborate on specifications. She is an open source developer-turned-standards practitioner, who is passionate about bringing the best of open source... Read More →

Clarice Abreu

Senior Software Engineer, Brex

Clarice Abreu leads the roadmap and strategy for the Brex's GraphQL platform. She drives initiatives to improve schema quality, schema validation and observability, helping teams build and evolve a large-scale federated GraphQL architecture.

Aileen Chen

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Production Insights - Huge Scale

Audience Level Intermediate

11:25am PDT

Semantic Introspection - Pascal Senn, ChilliCream

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL's rich type system makes it an ideal foundation for agents to explore and work with APIs.
The SDL provides the structure agents need to reason about capabilities and data.
Queries let them retrieve information, while mutations enable them to take action.

In practice, however, production GraphQL schemas are often too large to fit in the context window and difficult to understand without additional context.
So what if agents could interact with any GraphQL API in a generic, reliable way?
In this session, we'll look at the challenges of agentic interactions with GraphQL and how semantic introspection could unlock a new way for agents to navigate the schema and interact with GraphQL APIs more reliably.

Speakers

Pascal Senn

COO, ChilliCream

I'm co-founder of ChilliCream, where we're passionate about advancing the GraphQL ecosystem. We develop and maintain open-source software, actively help and participate in the community, and create tools that help developers to get the most out of their GraphQL APIs. Since 2025, I’ve... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

11:25am PDT

How GraphQL Helped Create Scalability and Stability in the Retirement Space. - Cameron Sechrist, Stax.ai

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Retirement data is surprisingly complicated, from provisions to participant payroll data to plan sponsor's unique needs. This presents a complicated and heavy requirement to fetch data points that provide the value, and regulatory requirements, that third party administrators require. GraphQL provides this, it allows specific data to be fetched at each stage of the plan lifecycle, without requiring us to fetch all of the data that we have. This allowed our platform to decrease latency by 30%, load time by 1 second, and server load by 50%.

Speakers

Cameron Sechrist

Head of Engineering, Stax.ai

Cameron Sechrist is a dynamic software engineer, seasoned entrepreneur, and compliance expert with over a decade of experience driving technological innovation and ensuring robust data security across diverse industries. His entrepreneurial journey began remarkably early, with his... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Any

11:25am PDT

Coordinated Access Control with @policy - Huang Minghe, Booking.com

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

At a company like Booking.com, every sensitive field in the GraphQL schema has more than one team with a legitimate claim on it — Security, Identity, Legal, Privacy, Data Governance, the Traffic Gateway, the Federation Platform, and the hundreds of domain teams that own the data itself. When that many stakeholders need to agree on what "authorized" means for a single field, you don't have a security problem; you have a coordination problem. And solving it as security only makes it worse.This talk shares how we turned that coordination problem into a contract using a single federation directive — @policy. Domain teams author rules for the data they own. Privacy and Identity contribute cross-cutting concerns. Other domains compose by reference instead of re-authoring. The router is the only place enforcement happens. One audit trail. No cross-team meetings.

What you'll learn:

Why multi-stakeholder access control is a coordination problem, not a security one

How @policy becomes the coordination contract between domain teams, cross-cutting authorities, and the federation platform

The single-enforcement-point + bounded-authorship + free-reuse architecture — and how it lets new teams adopt without coordination overhead

Speakers

Huang Minghe

Senior Software Engineer, Booking.com

Minghe is a Senior Engineer at Booking.com with over 15 years of industry experience spanning DevOps, web, and mobile development. Recently, he has been maintaining the GraphQL federation platform at Booking.com, focusing on efficiently managing large scale schemas and federating... Read More →

Coordinated Access Control with @policy — Minghe Huang · Field Notes pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 11:25am - 11:50am PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

GraphQL Embeddings: AI-Powered Dynamic Operations From Schema To IDE - Michael Watson, Self

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

What if your GraphQL API could understand what developers need and generate valid operations from plain English? This talk introduces graphql-embedding, an open-source toolkit that parses GraphQL schemas into vector embeddings, stores them in a vector store, and uses a multi-agent LLM pipeline to generate validated GraphQL operations from natural language input.

The architecture is fully modular: swap vector stores between PGLite for local development and PostgreSQL for production, choose from Ollama, OpenAI, or Anthropic as LLM providers, and extend with your own. A key design decision was bundling a lightweight embedding model directly in the package, enabling local CPU inference with no external API calls, cloud dependencies, or GPU required. The entire pipeline to generate a operation works with small, efficient models like QWen 2.5 running locally via Ollama.

Everything ships as a VS Code extension called GraphQL Workbench, putting schema embedding and natural language operation generation directly in the developer's workflow. All packages, models, and the extension are fully open source under the MIT license.

Speakers

Michael Watson

Principal Developer Relations Engineer, Expedia Group

Michael Watson was Head of Developer Relations at Apollo GraphQL, where he's spent ~8 years helping enterprises adopt GraphQL at scale. He founded the MCP Server Builder Series, a 3,000+ developer community with events in SF, NYC, London, and Amsterdam. Michael has delivered keynotes... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any

12:00pm PDT

Stop Reviewing Schemas: How Intuit Made Developers Faster by Automating Governance - Oleks Bidiuk, Intuit

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Abstract: Schema governance shouldn’t grind development to a halt or burn out graph stewardship teams. As Intuit’s Supergraph ecosystem grew, our reliance on manual schema reviews created bottlenecks that slowed onboarding and frustrated developers. We knew we needed a better approach — so we built a hybrid governance model that puts Schema Co-Pilot directly into the developer workflow and transformed our "API Jedis" from gatekeepers into enablers.

In this talk, you’ll learn how we built real-time IDE linting, AI-powered schema analysis, and semantic “collision” detection to surface issues before code is even committed. With these tools in place, onboarding timelines shrank from weeks to days, and contributors now ship to the graph with speed and confidence.

Who should attend: Platform engineers, API architects, and engineering leaders responsible for GraphQL governance and developer experience.

Key takeaway: Governance isn’t about gatekeeping — it’s about building smart tools that help your teams move faster with confidence.

Speakers

Oleks Bidiuk

Senior Software Engineer, Intuit

Senior Software Engineer at Intuit with 10+ years of evolution from JavaScript roots to complex systems. Outside the IDE, I bridge the gap between digital and tactile as a craftsman. I’m currently restoring the last "analog" Porsche 911—a hands-on project spanning everything from... Read More →

GraphQLConf 2026 Intuit Stop Reviewing Schemas (Oleks Bidiuk) pptx

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Schema Design + Evolution + Governance

Audience Level Advanced
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00pm PDT

The Biggest Change To GraphQL Codegen in 10 Years - Eddy Nguyen, The Guild & SEEK & Igor Kusakov, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT

Boardroom

GraphQL Codegen has been the go-to tool for generating types for GraphQL clients for over a decade. But as use cases grew, so did the friction: excessive generated code, complex setups, and growing confusion among users on how to use the output.

In this talk, we'll explore a new client-focused Codegen setup that rethinks those trade-offs. You'll see how we drastically reduce generated output, ensure correct and predictable types, and provide a smooth migration path from existing tools without sacrificing flexibility or safety.

We'll also dive into the story behind the change: a collaboration between Eddy (The Guild) and Igor (Yelp), sparked by a single question and shaped by open discussion across time zones. It’s a look at how community feedback, real-world constraints, and trust can drive the biggest evolution in Codegen’s history.

Speakers

Eddy Nguyen

Software Developer, The Guild

Eddy is a Lead Engineer at SEEK, where he builds GraphQL-driven applications by day. By night, he moonlights at The Guild as a GraphQL Code Generator maintainer—with the unrelenting support of his two cats.

Igor Kusakov

Senior Developer, Yelp

Seasoned full-stack sorcerer with 20+ years crafting scalable web empires, from Montreal's tech trenches to global gigs at spots like Yelp and beyond.

biggest change codegen graphqlconf 2026 pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:00pm - 12:25pm PDT
Boardroom

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Beginner
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:25pm PDT

Lunch

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:25pm - 1:55pm PDT

Foyer + Bistro 880

Wednesday May 20, 2026 12:25pm - 1:55pm PDT
Foyer + Bistro 880

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

1:55pm PDT

A GraphQL-inspired Orchestration Language for the AI Era - Martijn Walraven, Apollo

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL and Federation solve real problems: replacing hand-written orchestration with a declarative, typed contract between clients and backends. That model works. But the landscape is shifting — AI agents are becoming first-class API clients, and they need to compose across services, reshape responses, and build workflows faster than coordinated schema design allows.

The core insight: one graph doesn't have to mean one API. What if the supergraph were less a single schema and more a catalog of data and services? That shift opens up a different kind of client language: one with expressions, data restructuring, and the ability to call non-GraphQL APIs directly.

I'll show the result of our explorations: a language that keeps what makes GraphQL powerful — strong typing, composability, field-level selection — and extends it with the primitives clients need to work across service boundaries. It should feel familiar and is designed for any client — web, mobile, and AI agents alike. I'll explain what we learned from pushing GraphQL and Federation to their limits, and make the case that breaking the mold doesn't mean starting over.

Speakers

Martijn Walraven

Software Engineer, Apollo

Martijn Walraven lives in Amsterdam and has been with Apollo since the early days of our GraphQL journey. He is one of the co-creators of Apollo Federation.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

1:55pm PDT

Observability for a Multi-Tenant GraphQL Gateway at Scale - Vickey Yeh, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Viaduct, Airbnb's unified data access layer, hosts over 1.5M lines of application code from 500+ tenants, with 200+ changes merged daily—all operating as a single service. At this scale, enabling teams to independently monitor and troubleshoot their code is essential.
This talk describes how we approach observability with multitenancy at the core:
- Establishing clear ownership of modules and attributing metrics, spans, and errors to those owners
- Providing alerts and dashboards at multiple levels: system, operation, tenant, and field
- Enabling schema-driven alerting, where tenants declaratively specify monitoring requirements directly in the schema and the platform implements them automatically
- Using execution traces to visualize query execution and core-tenant interactions, tackling challenges like:
- Representing batched dataloader calls (where N field requests become 1 RPC)
- Instrumenting downstream service clients across all data-fetching code
- Managing observability costs via selective sampling and cardinality-aware metrics

Our goal: empower tenants to manage their portion of Viaduct as a standalone service—without bottlenecking on the platform team.

Speakers

Vickey Yeh

Senior Software Engineer, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based data-oriented service mesh.

observability multi tenant graphql at scale pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Observability + Telemetry + Tracing

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

1:55pm PDT

Grafast: A Declarative Solution To GraphQL's Execution Woes - Benjie Gillam, Graphile

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT

Boardroom

A new approach to GraphQL execution, enabling engineers to build next-level efficiency into new or existing GraphQL APIs. This declarative approach to execution eliminates the many pitfalls of traditional resolvers and optimizes communications with your business logic. This is achieved through understanding the request's full data requirements and planning the best batched execution strategy before requesting anything from the business logic. This decoupling of data fetching from the GraphQL request shape results in fewer and more efficient operations against your backend services and data sources, eliminating both over- and under-fetching on the backend along with deduplication of redundant work, leading to reduced operational costs and delightful user experiences! A passion project of a founding GraphQL TSC member, this MIT-licensed open source technology has already been in production at a number of companies for over a year!

Speakers

Benjie Gillam

Maintainer, Graphile

A self-described "community-funded open source maintainer," Benjie dedicates much of his time to open source, made possible by the support of appreciative and forward-thinking individuals and organizations. He can often be found helping contributors advance their proposals, and has... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Intermediate

2:30pm PDT

CANCELLED: Governing the AI-Graph: Observability and Security for LLM-Generated Queries - Rajeshwari Sah, Apple Inc

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

When we give AI agents access to our GraphQL APIs, we introduce a new class of distributed system challenges: non-deterministic queries, potential N+1 floods, and authorization bypasses. How do we ensure our "AI-generated" queries are safe and efficient?

This talk bridges the gap between AI Quality Engineering and GraphQL governance. Building on my work designing evaluation frameworks for multi-agent systems, I will present strategies for monitoring and governing agents that interact with GraphQL endpoints. We will discuss how to implement "Semantic Rate Limiting" (analyzing query complexity vs. user intent) and how to evaluate the accuracy of agent-generated GraphQL syntax using "LLM-as-a-Judge" frameworks.

We will also cover the "Human-in-the-Loop" aspect: using GraphQL subscriptions to stream agent reasoning to human supervisors for real-time validation before a mutation is executed. Attendees will learn how to open their Graphs to AI without compromising on security or performance reliability.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Intermediate

2:30pm PDT

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction - Linquan Zhang & Cetin Sahin, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Boardroom

At Airbnb, our GraphQL gateway is a multi-tenant serverless platform hosting 500+ tenants and 1.5M+ lines of application code. Like many large GraphQL systems, it operated as a "shared fate" architecture. To mitigate this risk, we embarked on a multi-year journey to implement traffic sharding at different levels of sophistication. We started with shuffle sharding to reduce the blast radius of any single bad operation. We then added targeted sharding to separate online from asynchronous traffic, to rapidly quarantine misbehaving operations, and to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for our automated canary analysis. Most recently, to mitigate the risk posed by tenants that are used by lots of operations (and thus could bring down lots of shards), we have been working on tenant-aware sharding that minimizes the blast radius of such tenants.

We will cover how we architected our sharding solution and how it improved our operational abilities. You will gain a clear understanding of how our implementation tradeoffs have fared over time, key production insights gathered since rollout, and strategies to evolve a GraphQL gateway towards greater isolation without fragmenting the API surface.

Speakers

Linquan Zhang

Individual Contributor, Airbnb

I work on Viaduct, Airbnb's GraphQL-based system that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb.

Cetin Sahin

Staff Software Engineer, Airbnb

Cetin works on Viaduct, Airbnb’s multi-tenant GraphQL platform that provides a unified interface for accessing and interacting with any data source at Airbnb. His work centers on reliability, performance, and observability at scale.

Sharding a GraphQL Gateway for Blast Radius Reduction pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

2:30pm PDT

The Easy Way and the Hard Way: Blue-green GraphQL Deployments - Zack Warnimont, Apollo

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Blue-green and canary deploys are table stakes for application code, but they’re surprisingly hard to get right for GraphQL. Routers often just “pull latest” schema, rollbacks mean republishing and recomposing, and it’s nearly impossible to answer a basic incident question: “What schema was this request actually hitting?”. After testing in a staging environment and deploying to production, we often find edge cases that broke the assumptions we made in the testing phase.

This talk is an engineering case study. I’ll walk through the design journey that led us to a blue-green deployment model for GraphQL built on immutable schema artifacts and explicit rollbacks. We’ll unpack the constraints (federation, many subgraphs, multiple environments), the dead-ends we hit, and the principles that finally worked.

You’ll leave with a mental model and concrete patterns you can apply to your own GraphQL infrastructure, irrespective of tooling: how to structure blue-green router fleets, how to pin to exact schema versions, how to do instant rollbacks safely, and what to log so you can always reconstruct “what was live where” when production gets weird.

Speakers

Zack Warnimont

Software Engineer, Apollo

Zack is a Software Engineer currently working at Apollo. He has worked for companies small and large over the last 10 years, with an emphasis on deployment safety and development efficiency.

In his free time, Zack enjoys playing piano and spending time with his family. Ask him anything about music... Read More →

graphqlconf 2026 05 zack warnimont no paging pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 2:30pm - 2:55pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale With LLMs and @generateMock - Michael Rebello, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Boardroom

Producing valid and realistic mock data for prototyping and testing has been an unsolved challenge for years. Mock data is tedious to write and maintain, but attempts to improve the process such as random value generation and field stubbing fall short as they lack essential domain context to make test data realistic and meaningful.
In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve reimagined GraphQL mocking at Airbnb by combining existing GraphQL infrastructure, rich product and schema context, and LLMs to generate convincing, type-safe mock data simply by adding a directive (@generateMock) to a field or operation:
- How integrating LLMs that are highly contextualized by a schema, documentation, and UX design into existing GraphQL tools drives a leap forward in the speed and quality of mock data creation.
- How a directive-driven approach lets engineers generate production-like, schema-conformant mock data without writing code.
- How integrating generated mock data into the GraphQL client runtime can enable engineers to build and test clients before server implementation.
- How this strategy guarantees that generated mock data is correct, deterministic, and stays in-sync with the server schema.

Speakers

Michael Rebello

Staff Engineer, Airbnb

Michael is a Staff Engineer at Airbnb focusing on GraphQL clients, with >10 years of tech experience. Previously, he spent 6 years at Lyft as Staff Engineer leading mobile networking, building the rider app, and contributing to their engineering blog. He's spoken at conferences globally... Read More →

GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale with LLMs and generateMock pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Boardroom

AI and LLMs

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

Building MCP Apps With GraphQL Patterns You Already Know - Jerel Miller, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

You know how to build client apps—but where do client developers fit in the new world of ChatGPT and MCP? If you've used GraphQL before, it turns out your knowledge translates directly. This talk demonstrates how to build MCP apps using Apollo's AI apps client and MCP server with patterns you already use:
1. Fragment colocation → Tool design: Structure MCP tools like component data requirements
2. Query optimization → Tool call patterns: Minimize LLM roundtrips with the same performance thinking
3. Type safety → Tool schemas: Apply GraphQL's type discipline to MCP definitions
A live demo builds an MCP app querying a GraphQL API, showing how best practices from GraphQL client development apply to OpenAI and MCP apps.

Speakers

Jerel Miller

Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Jerel is a Colorado native with a brief stint in Portland Oregon. He loves to code and learn about all sorts of programming patterns. He is an avid Denver Broncos fan and loves to play the bass.

GraphQL Conf 2026 Jerel pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Clients

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:05pm PDT

The State of GraphQL Federation - Michael Staib, ChilliCream

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

The GraphQL community has come together to standardize how distributed systems can be built with GraphQL as an orchestrator.

In this talk, I will outline our vision for GraphQL as an orchestration layer and explain how the emerging Composite Schema specification addresses the challenges of composing distributed graphs. We’ll review the progress made since the last GraphQLConf within the Composite Schema Working Group and take a look at early RFCs and experimental prototypes.

The specification builds on the strongest ideas from existing federation approaches in the ecosystem, distilling them into a vendor-neutral standard. Its goal is to enable interoperability — allowing vendors, platform teams, and open-source projects to implement the specification, or parts of it, in a way that integrates seamlessly across tools and ecosystems.

This session is a community update on the work happening under the GraphQL Foundation to standardize Federation: the problems we are solving, the principles guiding the design, and what comes next.

Speakers

Michael Staib

CEO, ChilliCream

Michael is a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee, a Microsoft MVP, and Co-Founder and CEO of ChilliCream. He is the creator of Hot Chocolate, a widely used GraphQL server and client platform for .NET, and one of the authors of the Composite Schema specification. Michael... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:05pm - 3:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Intermediate

3:30pm PDT

Break

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:30pm - 3:50pm PDT

Foyer

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:30pm - 3:50pm PDT
Foyer

Breaks + Networking + Special Events

3:50pm PDT

Changing the Game for Trusted Documents — What If Your Whole Platform Natively Supported It? - Laurin Quast & Denis Badurina, The Guild

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Boardroom

Trusted documents (persisted queries) are one of the most powerful tools in the GraphQL security and performance toolkit. By restricting your API to only pre-approved operations, you eliminate entire classes of attacks, reduce payload sizes, and gain full visibility into client behavior. Yet most struggle to adopt them – the tooling is fragmented, the workflow is manual, and the deployment story is an afterthought.

What if your entire platform natively supported trusted documents from end to end? In this talk, I’ll show what becomes possible when persisted queries are first-class citizens of your GraphQL platform – from registration and version through CI/CD validation to production deployment and rollback. But trusted documents aren’t just for GraphQL clients. I’ll explore how they unlock new capabilities: exposing GraphQL operations as simple REST endpoints, and even powering MCP tools for AI agents – all built on the same foundation of pre-approved, governed operations.

You’ll leave with a clear picture of what a complete trusted documents platform looks like and practical steps to get there.

Speakers

Denis Badurina

Denis from The Guild, The Guild

I am a self-taught senior software architect, with a distinguishing trait of resiliently finding simple solutions to complex problems using communication through words and code.

Starting from my first Lego set, I've been in love with development throughout my whole life. As a creator, having the ability to turn thoughts into reality is a gift I find essential. Forever learning through practical applications, bad decisions and positive thoughts - I, ulti... Read More →

Laurin Quast

Developer, The Guild

Laurin Quast is a developer that started exploring GraphQL, by leading API development at a start-up. Realizing that there are still many unsolved problems and challenges within the space, he started contributing to famous JavaScript libraries, such as GraphQL Code Generator. Diving... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Boardroom

Clients

Audience Level Any

3:50pm PDT

Brute Force Correctness - James Bellenger, Airbnb

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

So you’re a maintainer of a GraphQL system. Whether it’s a federation gateway, a complex client library, or a custom executor—how do you know that it’s capital-C Correct?

Your tests are decent, and they seem to pass, but what about the test cases that you didn’t think of? Did you remember to handle @skip directives on fragment spreads? What about when those directives use variables? Or when you spread an abstract type in an abstract scope?

Would you trust your system to serve million-dollar transactions?

This session will cover how probabilistic testing can be applied to complex GraphQL systems to find bugs in places we wouldn’t have thought to look. We’ll discuss how Airbnb leveraged this approach to launch a novel GraphQL engine with 0 spec conformance bugs, and how you can apply these same techniques to build unshakable confidence in your own systems.

Speakers

James Bellenger

Engineer, Airbnb

Running and baking enthusiast.

Brute Force Correctness selected stills pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

3:50pm PDT

Speed Without Sacrifice: How Wayfair Transforms DevEx With AI and MCP - Maheswari Karlapudi & Muskan Sethi, Wayfair

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

Wayfair is embedding AI and MCP into every stage of the developer workflow to unlock speed without compromising quality. From Schema Copilot (inline reviews) to AI Mocking (intelligent test data generation) to AI-Assisted Schema Documentation (auditing and auto-generating descriptions across 200+ subgraphs), these purpose-built tools streamline workflows, reduce friction, and scale engineering excellence—helping teams ship faster with greater confidence and consistency. Join to learn how AI and MCP cut busywork so Wayfair’s devs can ship faster with confidence.

Speakers

Maheswari Karlapudi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Maheswari is a Software Engineer on the GraphQL Platforms team at Wayfair, providing a stable and resilient gateway for e-commerce data. Her work focuses on platform reliability and performance, while crafting the tooling necessary to accelerate the developer lifecycle across Way... Read More →

Muskan Kaur Sethi

Software Engineer, Wayfair

Muskan is a Software Engineer on Wayfair’s GraphQL Platforms team, where she develops reliable and scalable infrastructure to support e-commerce data access. Her work centers on improving platform performance and stability, as well as building developer tools that streamline workflows... Read More →

Accelerating the GraphQL Lifecycle pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 3:50pm - 4:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Tooling + DX + Testing + Documentation

Audience Level Intermediate
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:25pm PDT

Lightning Talk: DoS Wars: Revenge of the Fragments - Sachin Shinde, Apollo GraphQL

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Fragments—an indispensable tool for modularizing data requirements alongside client code, but also a denial-of-service attack vector for servers. Security guides will tell you to mitigate by validating queries and performing cost analysis, usually via field costs and list sizes. However, this focus on field execution can distract from how fragments affect the rest of the server stack. In this lightning talk, we explore the attack patterns and mitigation strategies for the fragment-based vulnerabilities at the core of CVE-2025-31496, CVE-2025-32030, CVE-2025-32033, and CVE-2025-32034.

Speakers

Sachin Shinde

Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL

Working on all things federation and orchestration at Apollo, previously worked on the Apollo Studio schema and metrics pipelines.

DoS Wars Revenge of the Fragments pdf

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:35pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Security

Audience Level Any
Presentation Slides Attached Yes

4:25pm PDT

@live GraphQL in Practice: Postgres-to-React Realtime Data Sync - Tobbe Lundberg, Cedar Software AB

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT

Grand Ballroom I

We built a real-time system for Postgres→React sync using a `LISTEN/NOTIFY` Postgres trigger, GraphQL `@live` queries, a React hook and a custom ORM-inspired GraphQL query builder. Starting from ESP32 microcontroller devices sending MQTT messages and a Node/Postgres backend, we moved from polling to a stand-alone PoC with Yoga, Prisma triggers, and a custom `useLiveQuery` hook. After proving that the PoC was working we integrated with all our existing full-stack apps. So now we have low-latency UI updates, reusable cross-app logic, and easier extension for new sensor values. Great UX and excellent DX.

TOC

- Title & minimal intro
- Goals (What We Needed)
- Existing System (What We Had)
- Attempts & Why They Failed
- Solution Overview
- Postgres `LISTEN/NOTIFY`
- `useLiveQuery` React hook
- Yoga and Apollo `@live` integration
- GraphQL query builder
- GraphQL SDL generator
- GraphQL resolver generator
- Demo / Results
- Tradeoffs, Lessons & Next Steps
- Q&A

Speakers

Tobbe Lundberg

-, Cedar Software AB

Tech Lead at Aerafarms. Maintainer of CedarJS. Lives out in the middle-of-nowhere in Sweden. Likes everything on two wheels and loves to travel.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom I

Production Insights - Regular Scale

Audience Level Beginner

4:25pm PDT

Turning San Francisco Into a GraphQL Server - Jean Lucas Lima, ConfrariaTech

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT

Boardroom

What if a city could run as a GraphQL server?

In this talk, we model San Francisco as a modular GraphQL runtime powered by Viaduct. Instead of stitching together microservices or configuring external gateways, we organize zoning, building permits, transit, and census data as domain modules inside a single distributed graph engine.

Using real public datasets from the City of San Francisco and the U.S. Census, we demonstrate how tenant modules compose into a unified schema, how execution is coordinated across domain boundaries, and how teams can evolve parts of the graph without central bottlenecks.

We introduce a lightweight Skills SDK that abstracts runtime configuration and enforces clear ownership rules, making modular graph design approachable.

Finally, we connect an AI client to the server to demonstrate structured, explainable reasoning over live city data.

All demo code and schema modules will be open sourced for attendees to explore and extend.

Speakers

Jean Lucas Lima

Founder, ConfrariaTech

Jean Lucas is a Developer Advocate focused on distributed systems and GraphQL runtime architecture. He works on making complex graph platforms like Viaduct approachable through clear abstractions and open-source examples. Based in Brazil, he also founded ConfrariaTech, a community... Read More →

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:25pm - 4:50pm PDT
Boardroom

Servers

Audience Level Beginner

4:40pm PDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk: Search and Execute with Code Mode Backed by the Graph - Jens Neuse & Ahmet Soormally, Wundergraph

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:40pm - 4:50pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Ahmet Soormally

Principal Engineer, Wundergraph

Ahmet Soormally is a Principal Engineer at WunderGraph, where he helps organizations build and scale modern graph platforms. His work focuses on graph consumption across multiple protocols - including GraphQL, REST, gRPC, Connect, and MCP for AI agents - helping teams design APIs... Read More →

Jens Neuse

Jens Neuse (CEO WunderGraph), WunderGraph

Jens is a father to 3 kids, tries to be a good husband, is the author and a maintainer of graphql-go-tools for more than 6 years, and the CEO and Co-Founder of WunderGraph, a company that offers Cosmo, an open source GraphQL Federation platform.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 4:40pm - 4:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Federation + Distributed Systems

Audience Level Any

5:00pm PDT

Keynote: GraphQL’s Next Chapter: Progress, Proposals, and Participation - Pascal Senn, COO, Chillicream & Mark Larah, Group Tech Lead, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:00pm - 5:20pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

GraphQL has always been a community driven project. In this closing keynote, we will look at what the GraphQL Working Groups have been building and the progress made across the specification and ecosystem. We will also highlight the GraphQL GAP proposal and explore how it can open new opportunities for collaboration. Join us as we reflect on how far GraphQL has come and how the community can help shape what comes next.

Speakers

Pascal Senn

COO, ChilliCream

Mark Larah

Group Tech Lead, Yelp

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:00pm - 5:20pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

5:20pm PDT

Keynote: Closing Remarks - Lee Byron, Co-Creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:20pm - 5:30pm PDT

Grand Ballroom II - IV

Speakers

Lee Byron

Co-creator of GraphQL and Director, GraphQL Foundation

Wednesday May 20, 2026 5:20pm - 5:30pm PDT
Grand Ballroom II - IV

Keynote Sessions

Audience Level Any

8:00am PDT

8:00am PDT

9:00am PDT

10:00am PDT

10:15am PDT

10:15am PDT

10:15am PDT

10:30am PDT

10:50am PDT

10:50am PDT

10:50am PDT

11:25am PDT

11:25am PDT

11:25am PDT

12:00pm PDT

12:00pm PDT

12:00pm PDT

12:25pm PDT

1:55pm PDT

1:55pm PDT

1:55pm PDT

2:30pm PDT

2:30pm PDT

2:30pm PDT

3:05pm PDT

3:05pm PDT

3:05pm PDT

3:30pm PDT

3:50pm PDT

3:50pm PDT

3:50pm PDT

4:25pm PDT

4:25pm PDT

4:25pm PDT

4:40pm PDT

5:00pm PDT

5:20pm PDT

Get help with the event