Speaking
Real incidents. Real lessons.
No vendor pitch.
I speak to engineering teams about how to run incidents with calm, clarity, and rigor. Talks are drawn from 20+ years on the front line — eBay-scale e-commerce, fintech production, and platforms in between.
Topics
Incident Command from Startup to Enterprise
How the IC role scales — and breaks — as your engineering org grows. Practical frameworks for adopting ICS principles without enterprise overhead.
Incident Management That Actually Works
Severity triage, communication frameworks, escalation decision trees, and the runbook patterns that hold up at 3am.
Blameless Postmortems & Organizational Learning
How to run RCAs that produce durable corrective actions instead of theater — and how to keep them blameless when the pressure is on.
Site Reliability Engineering in Practice
SLOs, error budgets, toil elimination, and the reliability culture that separates teams that ship from teams that firefight.
Building the On-Call You'd Actually Want
Rotation design, alert quality, escalation paths, and how to make on-call a respected craft instead of an attrition driver.
AI in Operations Without Giving Up Your Data
How AI is reshaping incident response, runbooks, and on-call — and why data sovereignty is the dividing line. Options range from private model deployments with providers like Google and Anthropic to fully self-hosted, internally trained models, and the tradeoffs that come with each.
Who I speak to
Enterprise platform teams
Maturing IC practice across multiple business units, tooling consolidation, and exec reporting.
Scale-ups & high-growth startups
First IC playbook, on-call rotation design, and the postmortem culture you set early.
Conferences & meetups
Keynotes and technical talks on incident response, SRE, and operational excellence.
Have an event in mind?
Send a note with the audience, format, and date. I'll come back with a topic shaped to fit.
mrhits777@gmail.com