Now Live AI Infrastructure Audit — Free 30-min review for SaaS & AI teams
Book Discovery Call
Home / Services / Reliability Engineering
Reliability Engineering · 03 of 04

From 3am alerts
to 99.97% uptime.

We replace alert chaos with SLO-driven operations. Monitoring that means something, runbooks your team actually uses, postmortems that change the system, and an on-call rotation that doesn’t burn anyone out.

Book SRE Call See what we ship
0%
Median uptime maintained post-engagement
−0%
Reduction in engineering toil within 90 days
0 min
Median MTTR after our runbooks ship
SLO Status Board · live
30-day window
api.availability
target 99.95% · window 30d
99.97%
checkout.latency p99
target < 280ms · window 7d
214ms
db.error-rate
target < 0.1% · window 30d
0.18%
auth.success-rate
target 99.9% · window 30d
99.94%
4
SLOs tracked
3/4
In budget
0
P1 last week
Reliability shipped for YC-backed startups, Series A–C SaaS, and AI teams worldwide
How Reliability Breaks Down

It rarely fails all at once.
It frays at the edges first.

Every engineering team thinks they’re one quarter away from “fixing reliability.” Most never get there. Here’s what’s usually happening:

Stage 1 · Month 0–3

The first page

A real customer-impacting incident. Engineers respond, fix it, post a small write-up. Everyone says “let’s add a monitor for that.” Sometimes it gets added. The lesson rarely outlives the week.

Stage 2 · Month 3–12

The recurring pages

The same 3 services page over and over. Alerts mean less every time they fire. Tribal knowledge accumulates in a few senior heads. Newer engineers can’t tell which alerts matter.

Stage 3 · The wall

The burnout wall

On-call becomes the thing nobody wants. Your best engineer quietly starts interviewing. Sales conversations stall on “what’s your uptime SLA?” Customer churn ticks up after each public incident. Engineering velocity collapses under firefighting load.

Engineer working late on monitoring dashboards
“My senior engineer was carrying the pager for two years. When she gave notice, I realized we hadn’t built reliability — we’d built dependency on one person.“
VP Engineering · Series B B2B SaaS, 45 engineers

This pattern is fixable.

The fix isn’t more tools or more dashboards. It’s SLOs that define what “good” means, runbooks that survive the engineer who wrote them, and an on-call rotation built so no one person is load-bearing.

See what we ship
What’s Broken

Five patterns we find
in nearly every on-call.

These are the specific failure modes that turn a reliability problem into a recruitment problem. Each one quietly compounds until it becomes the only thing your senior engineers can work on.

01 · The fatigue problem

Alerts mean nothing because everything’s an alert.

Page after page, none of them actionable. Engineers learn to dismiss notifications before reading them. The signal-to-noise ratio collapses to where the next real outage takes longer to detect than it should — because nobody trusts the alerts anymore.

On-call pages · last 7 days 87% noise
Mon
8
Tue
14
Wed
5
Thu
9
Fri
12
Sat
7
Sun
10
65 pages this week · only 8 led to actual fixes
02

No SLOs — nobody knows what “good” means.

Without Service Level Objectives, every incident is an emergency, every outage is a debate, and reliability work loses to feature work every sprint. Sales can’t answer the SLA question. Customers can’t trust the uptime claim.

03

Toil eats 50% of engineer time.

Manual deploys, copy-paste runbooks, repetitive triage. The work that should be automated stays manual because automating it competes with the next feature. The team’s most expensive hires spend half their time on tasks a script should handle.

04

Postmortems that change nothing.

Document written, action items filed, Jira tickets created. Nothing gets shipped because nobody owns the followup. Six months later the same incident happens again. The team has 40 historical postmortems and zero systemic improvements.

05

One engineer is load-bearing.

One senior owns all the tribal knowledge. They get every escalation. They can’t take a real vacation. When they leave — and they will — the on-call rotation collapses. The reliability you have isn’t engineering. It’s one person’s heroism.

Where You Are vs Where You’ll Land

Four levels of reliability maturity.

Most teams we meet are at Level 1 or Level 2. Our engagement gets you to Level 3 within 8–12 weeks. Level 4 is what you grow into.

Level 1

Reactive firefighting

Alerts fire, engineers respond, fixes ship. No SLOs. No error budgets. Most teams live here until something breaks badly enough to force change.

Manual incident response
Alerts > signal
Tribal knowledge
No defined SLAs
Level 2

Monitored, not measured

Dashboards exist. Some alerts are tuned. But there’s still no shared definition of “good enough” and reliability work competes with feature work every sprint.

Grafana / Datadog deployed
Some runbooks exist
Ad-hoc postmortems
No error budget policy
Level 3

SLO-driven

SLOs defined per service, error budgets tracked, alerts tied to user impact. Runbooks tested. Postmortems are blameless and lead to system changes. This is where our engagement lands you.

SLI / SLO / error budgets
Tuned alerts, low noise
Tested runbooks
Blameless culture
Level 4

Embedded SRE

Reliability is a first-class engineering function. SREs and product engineers collaborate on releases. Toil is below 30% of SRE time. This is what you grow into after Level 3.

Dedicated SRE team
Toil < 30%
Pre-mortems on launches
Reliability OKRs
What We Ship

Six capability blocks.
All shipped, all tested.

Every Reliability Engineering engagement covers the same six areas. Depth varies with scope; nothing on this list is optional.

The output

An operations practice your team actually owns.

We don’t sell you a tool subscription. We build the practice: SLOs defined with your product team, alerts tuned with your on-call, runbooks tested in real drills, postmortems that ship system changes. Your engineers run it after we leave.

PrometheusGrafanaPagerDutyOpsGenieDatadogSentry
Monitoring dashboard on multiple screens
68% toil reduction avg

SLI / SLO design

Service Level Indicators per critical service, Objectives aligned with what your customers actually feel, and error-budget policies that govern when to ship features vs. when to fix reliability. Defined with your product team, not handed down.

SLIs/SLOsError budgetsBurn rate alerts

Monitoring stack

Prometheus + Grafana + Loki, or Datadog if you already use it. SLO dashboards your VP Eng can read at a glance. Service-level burn rate panels. Log correlation set up so the first question after an alert is answered, not asked.

PrometheusGrafanaLoki

Alerting & on-call

PagerDuty or OpsGenie integrated with your monitoring. Alerts tied to user-facing SLOs, not raw infrastructure metrics. Rotation built so no one person is load-bearing. Escalation paths documented and tested in a real drill before handover.

PagerDutySymptom-basedTuned thresholds

Runbooks & automation

A library of runbooks for the top 15 incident scenarios specific to your stack. Each one tested by being executed under non-emergency conditions. Repetitive operations automated — toil cut from the median 50% of engineer time to under 30%.

15+ runbooksTested drillsToil < 30%

Incident response

Severity levels defined, escalation paths owned, communications templates for status pages and customer comms. Incident commander rotation. A real fire drill the week before handover so the process is verified, not theoretical.

Severity matrixIC rotationStatus page

Blameless postmortem culture

The format your team uses, the cadence to do it, and the accountability structure that gets action items actually shipped. We facilitate the first three postmortems with your team before handing over. After this, postmortems change the system — not just document the failure.

TemplateCadenceAction tracking
The Dashboard You Walk Away With

A control plane your VP Eng can read in five seconds.

A simplified view of the SLO dashboard we ship with every engagement. Customized to your services and tooling — but the shape is consistent: one number to glance at, four panels to drill into.

Overview
SLOs
Incidents
Toil
Releases
Live · refreshed 12s ago
Composite SLO compliance
Weighted across 4 critical services · 30d
In budget
99.97%
+0.04% vs prior 30d
Error budget remaining
api.availability
72%
10.4 min remaining this month
0100%
MTTR p50
Last 30 days
Target met
7m 12s
−65% vs pre-engagement
Toil ratio
SRE time on toil vs eng
Healthy
28%
Target < 30%
0%50%
P1 incidents
Last 30 days
Down 78%
2
Prior 30d: 9
handover
What You Walk Away With

Numbers your VP Eng and CTO both care about.

Averaged across our last 18 Reliability Engineering engagements. Your numbers will vary — but the shape is consistent.

0%
Median uptime maintained 90 days post-handover
18 engagements averaged
−0%
Reduction in engineering toil
Measured at 90-day mark
0 min
Median MTTR after runbooks ship
Down from 31 min pre-engagement
−0%
Drop in P1 incidents over 90 days
vs prior 90-day window
How It Runs

Three phases. One named senior SRE from week one.

The full engagement runs 8–12 weeks depending on stack complexity. A senior SRE is named on day one and stays on your Slack and your calls the entire time.

Reliability assessment session
Assess
1
Weeks 1–2 · maturity assessment

Reliability baseline

A read-only audit of your current state: monitoring stack, alerts, incident history (12 months), on-call rotation, runbook inventory. We map you on the reliability ladder and write the gap analysis. Includes a 90-min review of your last 5 postmortems.

You’ll have
  • Written maturity assessment
  • Gap analysis vs Level 3
  • Top 10 reliability risks prioritized
  • Locked scope & price for build phase
Senior engineer building monitoring dashboards
Build
2
Weeks 3–9 · build & tune

SLOs, dashboards, runbooks

The build phase. We design SLOs with your product team, deploy the monitoring stack, tune alerts to symptom-based triggers, write the runbook library, set up the on-call rotation, and run a real fire drill the week before handover.

You’ll have
  • SLO/SLI definitions per service
  • Live monitoring dashboards
  • 15+ tested runbooks
  • On-call rotation + escalation
  • One verified fire drill on record
Knowledge transfer to engineering team
Handover
3
Weeks 10–12 · handover & first postmortems

Handover & first 3 postmortems

We facilitate the first three blameless postmortems with your team. Walkthrough sessions for every dashboard, runbook, and on-call procedure. 30 days of post-handover Slack access while your team runs it. After this, your team owns reliability.

You’ll have
  • 3 facilitated postmortems
  • Full operational documentation
  • Recorded walkthrough sessions
  • 30-day Slack support window
Three Ways To Engage

From a one-time sprint to fully managed 24/7.

All three start with the maturity assessment. What differs is how much we stay around after the build phase ships.

One-time

Reliability sprint

$22k
fixed
8–12 weeks · one-time engagement

Audit, build, handover. Your team owns operations from week 13. Best for teams ready to run their own SRE practice once it’s set up.

  • Maturity assessment + gap analysis
  • SLO/SLI design with your product team
  • Monitoring stack deployed in your repo
  • 15+ tested runbooks & on-call rotation
  • 3 facilitated postmortems & 30-day support
Start the sprint
Ongoing

Embedded SRE

$12k
/month
Month-to-month · cancel anytime

After the sprint, a senior SRE stays embedded part-time. They join your standup, own follow-ups on postmortems, and tune SLOs as your stack changes. Best for teams growing fast.

  • Everything in the sprint
  • Senior SRE on your Slack 8h/day
  • Monthly written reliability review
  • Postmortem facilitation continues
  • New services onboarded as you ship them
  • Cancel any month, no notice required
Discuss embedded SRE
Managed

Fully managed 24/7

$24k
/month
Quarterly contract · 24/7 coverage

We own the pager. Follow-the-sun rotation, P1 in < 15 min, all postmortems facilitated. For teams that need real reliability operations but can’t justify hiring 4–6 SREs.

  • Everything in embedded SRE
  • 24/7 on-call · we own the pager
  • P1 response < 15 min, SLA-backed
  • Incident command on every P1/P2
  • Monthly executive uptime report
Talk about managed
Recent Engagement

One client. From 9 P1s a month to 2.

A 10-week Reliability Engineering sprint at a Series B SaaS. We tracked P1/P2/minor incidents weekly for 12 weeks pre- and post-engagement.

SRE team monitoring production systems
Reliability Engineering Prometheus · PagerDuty · AWS 10 weeks delivered
From firefighting to SLO-driven operations in 10 weeks
B2B SaaS · ~45 engineers · Series B

“We thought we needed to hire two more senior engineers. What we actually needed was someone to teach us how to operate. Twelve weeks later, my team isn’t dreading the on-call rotation anymore.”

Sarah Chen
Sarah Chen
VP Engineering · B2B SaaS, Series B

The team was getting ~65 pages a week, with only ~12% leading to actual fixes. The senior engineer carrying most of the on-call had given soft notice. Our 10-week sprint defined SLOs for 4 critical services, tuned alerts to symptom-based triggers, shipped 18 runbooks, and ran a fire drill the week before handover. P1 incidents dropped 78% in the first 90 days post-engagement.

Stack & tools shipped
PrometheusGrafanaLokiPagerDutyAWS CloudWatchTerraformDatadog APMGitHub ActionsSentry
10 weeks
Sprint to full SLO-driven operations
−78%
P1 incidents in 90 days post-handover
99.98%
Uptime maintained over following quarter
0
Engineers quit citing on-call burnout
Weekly incident volume · 12 weeks pre / post
Dot size shows severity · engagement weeks shaded purple
P1 / Crit P2 / High Resolved
W-12
W-10
W-8
W-6
W-4
W+1
W+3
W+5
W+8
W+12
Before The Call

The seven questions VPs of Eng ask us.

Direct answers to the questions that come up before every Reliability Engineering call. Specific to SRE/on-call work — different from the FAQs on Cloud Infrastructure or Cost Optimization.

Ask us directly
How is this different from DevOps consulting?
DevOps answers “how do we ship faster” — CI/CD, deployment automation, infrastructure as code. SRE answers “how do we keep it running.” Different daily work, different skills, different tooling. We do both, but this engagement is specifically the SRE half: SLOs, error budgets, runbooks, on-call, postmortems. If you need pipelines and IaC, that’s the Cloud Infrastructure engagement — not this one.
Do we have to use your tooling stack?
No. We integrate with what you already have. Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb, Grafana Cloud, Splunk, ELK — we’ve shipped reliability practices on all of them. For greenfield work we prefer Prometheus + Grafana + Loki (open source, vendor-neutral) and PagerDuty for paging. But if your team is already deep on Datadog, we’ll build the practice in Datadog. The practice is the deliverable, not the tooling.
Will you take over our on-call rotation?
Only on the Fully Managed plan. On the sprint and embedded plans, your team owns the pager — we build the rotation, tune the alerts, and write the runbooks, but the page goes to your engineers. This is on purpose: the team that responds to incidents needs to own the system. We’ve seen too many “managed SRE” relationships where the customer’s team gradually forgets how their own infrastructure works. We don’t do that.
What if our infrastructure is already on fire?
Honest answer: fix the fire first, then call us. If you’re actively in a multi-week outage cycle, our 10-week sprint won’t help you in time. What you need is the Fully Managed plan with 24/7 incident response. We can be on the pager within 5 business days. Once stable, we transition you into a sprint or embedded model so reliability becomes durable rather than dependent on us.
What does “blameless postmortem” actually mean in practice?
It means we treat the question “why did this happen” as a system question, not a person question. If an engineer ran the wrong command, the question isn’t “why did Jamie make a mistake.” It’s “why did our system allow that command to succeed when it shouldn’t have.” The template, cadence, and facilitation we install make that distinction structural, not aspirational. The result: engineers actually disclose what really happened, which is the only way to actually fix things.
Can you work with our existing senior SRE / Platform engineer?
Yes — this is one of our most common engagements. A solo SRE carrying everything is unsustainable, and our job is to multiply their leverage, not replace them. We bring the missing time and the outside view they don’t have time to write. Most of our engaged senior SREs tell us they wished we’d been there a year sooner. We work alongside them, not around them.
What does pricing actually include?
Reliability Engineering sprints start at $22k fixed-scope for 8–12 weeks, scope confirmed in writing after the assessment call. Typical range $28–48k depending on number of services, existing tooling, and compliance requirements. Embedded SRE retainers from $12k/month, cancel anytime. Fully Managed 24/7 from $24k/month on a quarterly contract. If we miss our committed timeline you don’t pay for the overrun. All pricing is fixed — never variable, never hourly.
Ready when you are

From 3am alerts to a team that sleeps.

Book a 30-minute SRE call. Senior reliability engineer on the call. We’ll look at your incident history together and tell you whether an engagement makes sense — honestly.

Book SRE Call Compare all services
30-min consult Mutual NDA available Written scope & price No obligation