Humans of Reliability

When incidents pile up fast enough, every part of the company bleeds: support is fielding angry customers, AEs are on apology calls, and engineering is burning cycles on retrospectives instead of shipping. For Eran Kampf (VP of Engineering at Twingate ) where the product is the network, that was the moment he made a call most engineering leaders won't: stop all feature work for a quarter and...

"Hey Claude, where's my database?" The answer came back: "Oh, sorry, your database is gone." Alexey Grigorev , founder of DataTalks. Club and creator of the Zoomcamp courses that have taught data and ML engineering to over 100,000 people, knows Terraform well enough to cover it in his curriculum. That didn't stop a chain of small, reasonable-sounding decisions from en...

Every pilot who's never had an engine failure is still ready for one. The same can't be said for most software engineers facing their first major incident.  Hamed Silatani , co-founder and CEO of Uptime Labs , and former Head of Reliability Engineering at IG Group, has spent two decades watching engineers learn incident response the hard way: alone, under pressure, with no training.  A m...

For nine years, Maria Vechtomova was shouting about monitoring. Nobody cared, until LLMs arrived.  As co-founder of Cauchy, Databricks MVP, and one of the most followed voices in MLOps, Maria has watched the field evolve from hand-built experiment trackers to today's flood of observability tools, and her central claim might surprise you: globally, nothing has changed.  The fundamentals are th...

Most incident response advice focuses on tools, alerts, and post-mortems. Gandhi Mathi Nathan Kumar , Principal Incident Commander at Twilio , with 14 years running calls that have pulled in up to 100 responders, argues the work that actually matters happens in the first 15 minutes.  In this episode, Gandhi walks through what he calls the golden hour: the window where you decide whether you know w...

A centralized SRE team of 600 engineers as the first line of defense for every incident works - until the business asks you to spread that responsibility across 6,000.  Cliff Snyder, senior SRE at Multimedia and a decade-long veteran of LinkedIn's SRE org, walks through the 18-month project to democratize incident response: replacing a patchwork of Jira, Google Docs, and in-house tooling with...

Every engineering org says they want to improve reliability — but most can't even agree on what "good" looks like. Ganesh Datta, Co-Founder and CTO of Cortex, has spent the better part of a decade helping companies confront that gap.  In this conversation, Ganesh makes the case that platform engineering and SRE are solving the same human problem — earning adoption through influence,...

The self-healing systems that SREs have dreamed about for a decade aren't a distant promise anymore — they're already being built, and the biggest barrier left is cultural.  Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify, has spent over 25 years in the trenches of developer infrastructure, from sysadmin roots to running the platform that powers 5% of the internet.  In this episode, Dana makes the case that...

Most reliability engineering happens after something breaks. Will Wilson thinks that's the wrong place to be. As co-founder and CEO of Antithesis, the autonomous testing platform that just raised $105M in a Series A led by Jane Street, Will has spent years building the infrastructure to catch failure modes before they ever reach production. His starting point is uncomfortable: the testing pra...

Burnout doesn't announce itself. For Stephen Townsend, SRE team lead and host of the Slight Reliability podcast, it crept in over months of mounting pressure on a massive transformation program, and announced itself overnight with an inability to sleep. In this episode, Stephen shares his personal burnout story with rare honesty: the physical symptoms he dismissed, the org structure that left...

Code has never been easier to write. With AI copilots and agentic coding tools, spinning up features feels almost effortless. But production systems don’t run on vibes, they run on reliability. In this episode of Humans of Reliability , Swizec Teller , author of the bestselling Scaling Fast , argues that writing code was never the hard part. The hard part is making it run. We talk about the “Feynm...

Many companies don’t invest in incident management until something goes wrong. commonsku took a different path. In this episode of Humans of Reliability, Sylvain sits down with Dileshni Jayasingha, VP of Technology at commonsku, to talk about what it really takes to introduce incident management in a mature, profitable SaaS that had never formalized it. From rolling out observability and incident...

Shipping systems powered by LLMs would be hard enough if the models stayed the same. But in reality, they don’t. Models get updated and deprecated at a pace traditional software wouldn’t. All while teams are still expected to hit reliability targets that look a lot like traditional SLAs. In this episode, Tomás Hernando Koffman, Co-founder of Not Diamond, breaks down what it really takes to reach 9...

GenAI demos are easy. Production is where everything breaks. In this episode, Eduardo Ordax , Principal GTM GenAI at AWS, breaks down what actually stops companies from shipping reliable AI systems, and why the real blockers have little to do with technology. We dig into the culture problems that slow down adoption, the endless cycle of experimentation, and why non-deterministic LLMs don’t fit nea...

In this episode, Julien Simon, longtime voice in the open-source ML world, reminds us that even in the era of GenAI, reliability fundamentals haven’t changed. Julien breaks down why calling “the same model” from different providers can produce wildly different results, how deployment choices introduce hidden variability, and why reliability teams need to think of LLM systems as distributed systems...

Only 50% of companies monitor their ML systems . Building observability for AI is not simple: it goes beyond 200 OK pings. In this episode, Sylvain Kalache sits down with Conor Brondsdon ( Galileo ) to unpack why observability, monitoring, and human feedback are the missing links to make large language model (LLM) reliable in production. Conor dives into the shift from traditional test-driven deve...

Is “good code” still the right measure of engineering success in an AI-driven world? In this episode of Humans of Reliability , Rob Zuber , CircleCI CTO, joins Sylvain to explore how coding assistants are reshaping developer workflows and changing what teams value. Rob shares what he’s seeing across CircleCI’s customer base: a clear boost in throughput, new bottlenecks shifting from code creation...

What does it really take to move from firefighting incidents to building reliability at scale? In this episode of Humans of Reliability , Shery Brauner (Razor, ex-Zalando) shares her unique journey from frontend and backend engineering to leading site reliability practices. She explains why protecting the user journey is the key to effective incident management, how SLOs cut through noisy alerts,...

Sylvain Kalache sits down with Brian Shaw, Senior Engineering Leader at Uphold , to explore the reliability challenges that arise when operating at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto markets. Brian shares how unexpected market events can create massive traffic spikes, how their platform architecture and Kubernetes setup help them stay resilient, and why Uphold's transparency a...

Incident response is as much about people as it is about systems. In this episode, David Owczarek, a veteran engineer leader and seasoned incident commander, joins Silvan Kalache to unpack the human dynamics behind effective reliability leadership. Drawing on experiences across startups and global enterprises, David shares what really matters when everything breaks, including: – How incident respo...

AI is transforming reliability work—from reactive firefighting to proactive engineering. In this episode, Ryan Lockard, VP of Platform Engineering and AI Enablement at CVS Health, joins Sylvain Kalache to break down how AI is showing up on the frontlines of healthcare infrastructure and operations. From LLM copilots to cultural shifts in ownership, Ryan walks us through: How AI tools help troubles...

In this episode, we sit down with Cosmo Wolfe , Head of Technology at Metronome , to unpack how reliability, trust, and architecture intersect in one of the most critical and overlooked parts of the AI product stack: billing. As AI workloads introduce unpredictable usage patterns and nontraditional pricing models—from token-based to outcome-based—companies are navigating a new frontier of customer...

Internal platforms promise speed, consistency, and scale — but what happens when they become a distraction? In this episode, Chase Roberts, COO at Northflank , joins Sylvain Kalache to examine the quiet ways platforms erode developer experience when not planned carefully.  From abandoned golden paths to shadow deployments and brittle YAML pipelines, Chase walks us through:  Why early PaaS got deve...

In this episode of Humans of Reliability , we sit down with Justin Reock , Deputy CTO at DX , to unpack the real impact of generative AI on developer productivity. Drawing from early data in DX’s GenAI Impact Report, he explains why time savings alone don’t tell the full story and why the real value might lie in shifting cognitive load toward meaningful work.  We also explore how traditional produ...

In this episode, we explore how networking has shaped reliability as we know it. Marino Wijay cloud networking expert and Staff Solutions Architect at Kong shares how his journey began not as an SRE, but with cables, routers, and switches. Marino explains the evolution of the fabric holding systems together through virtualization, and how software-defined networking, which is now a key element to...