Why 'Everyone Owns Reliability' is a Myth: The Case for Dedicated SREs

The Case for a Dedicated Reliability Engineer

Author Samson Tanimawo argues against the common industry practice of distributing reliability ownership across all product engineers. He asserts that once a team exceeds 20 engineers, reliability visibly deteriorates without a dedicated owner.

Why This Matters

In an ideal model, reliability is a shared responsibility; however, the technical reality is that feature deadlines consistently override stability work. This creates a ‘tragedy of the commons’ where critical metrics like error budget burn and latency drift are ignored until a major outage occurs, resulting in significant lost revenue, customer churn, and developer burnout.

Key Insights

• The ‘Everyone Owns It’ Myth: When reliability competes with feature deadlines, the deadline wins every time, leaving reliability as low-priority work.
• Role Responsibilities: A dedicated engineer manages unglamorous but critical infrastructure such as SLO tracking, post-mortem reviews, and on-call rotation health.
• Operational Guardrails: The role involves building high-leverage tools including runbook templates and deployment guardrails to prevent regressions.
• Hiring Threshold: The optimal time to hire a dedicated reliability engineer is after reaching approximately 20 engineers.

Practical Applications

• • Use case: Mid-level engineer with production crisis experience managing error budget burn and latency drift to ensure boring stability.

• Pitfall: Assigning the role to a new hire or most senior infra engineer; results in lack of political capital or insufficient bandwidth.

• • Use case: Using an SRE to push back on ‘ship tonight’ requests when SLOs are already at risk.

• Pitfall: Treating reliability as part-time work for teams larger than 20; leads to deteriorating system health.

References:

• https://dev.to/samson_tanimawo/the-case-for-a-dedicated-reliability-engineer-1aga
• https://novaaiops.com