# Lorin Hochstein

> Lorin Hochstein is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in reliability at Airbnb, and one of the most respected voices in incident analysis and resilience engineering. Known for rewriting Chaos Monkey at Netflix, co-authoring the O'Reilly book 'Ansible: Up and Running', and contributing to the 'Learning from Incidents' community, he bridges the gap between academic complexity theory and real-world software operations. His blog 'Surfing Complexity' and conference talks challenge engineers to think more deeply about why systems fail and how humans make sense of them.

- **Role:** Staff Software Engineer, Reliability at Airbnb
- **Organizations:** Airbnb, Netflix, Coupang, SendGrid Labs, Nimbis Services, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Learning from Incidents
- **Education:** PhD, Computer Science, University of Maryland, M.S., Electrical Engineering, Boston University, B.Eng., Computer Engineering, McGill University
- **Known for:** Wrote version 2 of Chaos Monkey at Netflix, one of the foundational chaos engineering tools, Co-authored 'Ansible: Up and Running' (O'Reilly) - a widely-used DevOps reference book now in 3rd edition, Co-authored 'The Chaos Engineering Book' (O'Reilly) with Casey Rosenthal and others

## Career timeline

- **2000s** — Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- **2010s** — Computer Scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute
- **2013** — Lead Architect for Cloud Services at Nimbis Services
- **2014** — Co-authored 'OpenStack Operations Guide' (O'Reilly)
- **2014** — Published 'Ansible: Up and Running' 1st Edition (O'Reilly)
- **2015** — Senior Software Engineer at SendGrid Labs
- **2016** — Joined Netflix Cloud Operations and Reliability Engineering (CORE) team
- **2016** — Wrote version 2 of Chaos Monkey at Netflix; published paper 'Automating Failure Testing Research at Internet Scale' at SOCC '16
- **2019** — Led OOPS project at Netflix - encouraging engineers to report and document operational surprises
- **2020** — Co-authored 'The Chaos Engineering Book' (O'Reilly)
- **2021** — Published 'Ansible: Up and Running' 3rd Edition (O'Reilly)
- **2022** — Senior Staff Engineer at Coupang
- **2023** — Keynote at Learning From Incidents Conference: 'Your Understanding of Reality is Wrong'
- **2024** — Staff Software Engineer, Reliability at Airbnb
- **2026** — Speaking at SREcon26 Americas: 'The Power of Stories'

## Achievements

- Wrote version 2 of Chaos Monkey at Netflix, one of the foundational chaos engineering tools
- Co-authored 'Ansible: Up and Running' (O'Reilly) - a widely-used DevOps reference book now in 3rd edition
- Co-authored 'The Chaos Engineering Book' (O'Reilly) with Casey Rosenthal and others
- 68+ academic publications with 1,468+ citations on Google Scholar
- Best Student Paper Award at SC'05 for 'Parallel Programmer Productivity: A Case Study of Novice Parallel Programmers'
- Led the OOPS initiative at Netflix to systematize learning from operational surprises
- Curated the resilience-engineering GitHub repository - a definitive reading list for the field
- Regular keynote and invited speaker at SREcon, QCon, and Learning from Incidents Conference
- Key figure in building the Learning from Incidents community

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Scheduled to speak at SREcon26 Americas on 'The Power of Stories'
- **2025-10** — Track host at QCon San Francisco 2025
- **2023-02** — Keynote at Learning From Incidents Conference: 'Your Understanding of Reality is Wrong'
- **2022-08** — Contributed 'Making sense of incident metrics' to learningfromincidents.io
- **2022-00** — Opening keynote at SREcon22 EMEA

## Links

- Website: https://lorinhochstein.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lhochstein/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lhochstein
- GitHub: https://github.com/lorin

---

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