# Laura Nolan

> Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.

- **Role:** Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems
- **Organizations:** Stanza Systems, USENIX (Board of Directors), Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), TechWontBuildIt Dublin, SREcon Steering Committee
- **Nationality:** Irish
- **Education:** MA in Ethics, Dublin City University, MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety (in progress), Lund University
- **Known for:** Contributed 'Managing Critical State' chapter to the O'Reilly Site Reliability Engineering book (Google SRE book), Contributed to 'Seeking SRE' and '97 Things Every SRE Should Know', Resigned from Google in 2018 over Project Maven, helping catalyze cancellation of the DoD contract

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Joined Google as Site Reliability Engineer, Dublin (European HQ)
- **2015** — Presented Non-Abstract Large Scale Design workshop at SREcon15 Europe
- **2017** — Co-chaired SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa
- **2018** — Contributed 'Managing Critical State' chapter to O'Reilly SRE book
- **2018** — Resigned from Google over Project Maven (DoD autonomous weapons program); founded TechWontBuildIt Dublin
- **2018** — Joined Slack Technologies as Senior Staff Engineer focused on service networking and ingress load balancing
- **2019** — Delivered TED talk 'Why We Must Ban Killer Robots' at TEDxLiverpool
- **2021** — Co-presented with David D. Woods at SREcon21 on resilience engineering applied to SRE
- **2022** — Presented 'What SRE Could Be: Systems Reliability Engineering' at SREcon22 EMEA, Amsterdam
- **2023** — Keynoted LFI Conf 23 on systems thinking methods for incident analysis; spoke at StaffPlus London
- **2025** — Joined Stanza Systems as Principal Engineer
- **2025** — Presented at SREcon25 EMEA on responsible use of ML in SRE work

## Achievements

- Contributed 'Managing Critical State' chapter to the O'Reilly Site Reliability Engineering book (Google SRE book)
- Contributed to 'Seeking SRE' and '97 Things Every SRE Should Know'
- Resigned from Google in 2018 over Project Maven, helping catalyze cancellation of the DoD contract
- Founded TechWontBuildIt Dublin, an organization for technology workers concerned with industry ethics
- Member of the USENIX Board of Directors
- Co-chaired SREcon17 Europe/Middle East/Africa
- Delivered TEDx talk 'Why We Must Ban Killer Robots' with over hundreds of thousands of views
- Member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and ICRAC; briefed diplomats on autonomous weapons
- Co-created Non-Abstract Large Scale Design (NALSD) methodology for distributed systems evaluation
- Long-standing member and volunteer on the SREcon Steering Committee

## Latest updates

- **2025-04** — Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, building software to help humans understand and control production systems
- **2025-03** — Presented 'Responsible Use of ML in SRE Work: Between a (Thinking) Rock and a Hard Place' at SREcon25 EMEA
- **2025-01** — Writing Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack (lauranolan.substack.com)

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/lauralifts
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/lauralifts
- GitHub: https://github.com/sre-is-laura
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4FocUsT8VQ

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/laura-nolan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-21