Most engineers dream of writing code - but who keeps the code alive at 3 AM, making sure a million users never see a 500 error? That's the SRE, and the world can't hire them fast enough. This talk is a field-tested roadmap into Site Reliability and Platform Engineering, drawn from two decades of building SRE teams from scratch across multiple organizations.
We'll cover the two real paths in: the fresh graduate's 18-month journey from Linux fundamentals to first on-call rotation, and the career switcher's harder challenge - the mindset shift from "code is done when it compiles" to "code is done when it's observable in production." Attendees will walk away with the seven-pillar SRE competency matrix used in real hiring, the certifications that actually move the needle (and the ones that don't), and the interview signals that separate a true reliability engineer from a résumé.
Backed by data - 73% of high-performing orgs now run formalized SRE practices (DORA/Gartner), 25% YoY job growth, and Amazon losing ~$220K per minute of downtime - this session reframes SRE as the role of the decade. You'll leave with a concrete Week 1 starter pack to launch your own SRE origin story before you get home.
Sudarshan Balakrishna is VP of IT Operations at Epsilon India, with 20+ years building and scaling reliability engineering teams from the ground up. He leads multi-cloud operations, AIOps platform development, and SRE maturity initiatives, and is an active writer and thought leader on SRE, incident response, and operational excellence. He's passionate about turning production chaos into structured, observable, resilient systems — and about mentoring the next generation of on-call apprentices.
