Next Steps for Staff+ Reliability
See the real difference between a mid-level engineer and a Staff+: how they respond when the code breaks at 2 a.m.
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If the team panics when you book a vacation, you’ve built a hostage situation, not a system. Reliability is building systems that break gracefully, recover quickly, and maintain customers’ trust. That separates “John the chaos magnet” from you, the calm multiplier.
Here’s what to put into practice:
Define one SLO per critical flow: Turn user promises into contracts with error budgets and burn-rate alerts.
Wire observability: Capture latency, errors, saturation, and traces so fixes take minutes, not hours.
Run structured incidents: Assign roles, mitigate first, communicate clearly, and capture learnings.
Write runbooks: Short, actionable guides anyone can execute at 2 a.m.—not just John.
Schedule game days: Practice outages so the first time isn’t real.
Do these consistently, and reliability stops being luck and starts being design. It becomes a muscle your team can trust—one that gets you Staff+ credit for outcomes, not firefights.
Where to learn more
Dive deeper into chaos engineering in our newsletter post:
Learn the tools you need to design for reliability at scale in our most popular course:
Now let’s move on to “Data Engineering for Product Impact,” where reliability meets leverage.