site-reliability-engineering
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Nishant Modak Is Teaching Software to Notice What Humans Miss
The Last9 founder spent years learning that failure is rarely a single dramatic moment. His answer is an observability company built to close the gap between the systems engineers imagine and the systems actually running.
Pankaj Thakkar Wants the Cloud to Keep Its Receipts
Before he asked companies to own their observability data, Pankaj Thakkar helped make networks programmable. Now the Kloudfuse co-founder and CEO is applying the same instinct to telemetry: open the system, expose the machinery and make the bill predictable.
Auden Ehringer
Auden Ehringer is the Chief Technology Officer of Pave Finance and CEO of its technology subsidiary, Pave Labs. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist, he spent the early part of his career keeping some of the world's largest systems running - building Alexa sports features at Amazon Lab126 and serving as a Site Reliability Engineer on YouTube Discovery at Google. In 2023 he traded planet-scale infrastructure for the messier world of money, joining the New York fintech Pave Finance to build software that lets independent advisers automate and personalize portfolio management across thousands of client accounts. The platform he leads now helps oversee billions in assets, and in 2025 the company closed an oversubscribed $14M seed round.
Sang Lee
Sang Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Vibranium Labs, a New York startup building Vibe AI, billed as the first 24/7 AI site reliability engineer. A former Google and AWS engineer who lived through too many 2 a.m. outage firefights, Lee is building an agentic AI teammate that detects, triages, and resolves IT incidents before a human ever wakes up. In September 2025 the company raised $4.6M in seed funding led by Calibrate Ventures and Mirae Asset, with backing from a16z, Franklin Templeton, and others, claiming up to an 85% cut in mean time to resolution and counting Shutterstock among its clients.
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.
Freddie Heygate
Freddie Heygate is CEO, North America at Just After Midnight, a London-founded managed cloud services and 24/7 digital support company now part of the Ultima group. After spending five years building JAM's Asia-Pacific operations from Singapore, he relocated to Austin, Texas in January 2024 to lead the company's US expansion. With a background spanning digital consultancy, marketing, and business development at agencies including Reading Room and The Drum, Freddie brings over a decade of cross-continental experience helping global brands like Ford, Abbott, and Vodafone keep their digital infrastructure running around the clock.
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.
Liz Fong-Jones
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.
Roy Rapoport
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.