Platform engineers work hard to build great tooling and automations for developers, but often struggle to get feature teams to adopt the platform to its full potential. Meanwhile, SREs are buried in incident firefighting and can’t keep up with onboarding new services or proactive reliability initiatives.

Turns out these two challenges could be solved by tackling them together. In this talk, we’ll share how we combined platform engineering and SRE into one hybrid responsibility that doesn’t just ship tooling, it helps teams actually adopt it.

We’ll show how our Platform SREs make new services “reliable by default” with out-of-the-box observability, alerts, and SLOs.

But for those older, messier services? We send someone in. Embedded SRE style, but for a limited time and scope.

We’ll walk through how we structure these short-term embed missions, what’s worked (and what’s flopped), and how this helped adoption go way up without burning anyone out. If you’re tired of begging teams to migrate or your SREs are on the verge, this one’s for you.

Jorge is a Reliability Advocate at Rootly and the author of the Linux Foundation Introduction to Backstage (LFS142) course. He has a background in software engineering (ex-PayPal) and digital communication (UCLA). He's also a certified sommelier (CETT Barcelona).