The SRE industry has built world-class system reliability. DORA metrics, SLOs, error budgets, automated recovery, the tooling layer has never been more sophisticated. Yet major incidents keep revealing the same pattern: technically excellent teams failing not because the system broke, but because the humans around the system couldn't coordinate effectively under pressure.
This talk introduces a framework for the layer most engineering organisations have never deliberately built: human reliability. Drawing on direct experience building cloud communities in Germany and Cameroon, and grounded in DORA research and Crew Resource Management principles from aviation, the talk proposes a 6th reliability metric, Incident Response Reliability (IRR), and makes the case for treating human coordination under incident conditions as a hard engineering discipline, not a soft skill.
Through a concrete case study of a Berlin fintech SRE team with elite DORA scores and a critical human reliability gap, the audience sees exactly what IRR reveals that DORA cannot, and how six months of tracking it dropped their MTTR from 29 minutes to 11 minutes without a single system change.
Endah Bongo-Awah is a Cloud Platform Engineer at Bedrock Germany, AWS Community Builder (Year 3), and Google Women Techmakers Ambassador. She is the founder of MMA Academy, a mentorship programme focused on career transitions into tech. She has spoken at All Day DevOps, AWS Community Day DACH, AWS User Group in Bonn and Cologne, and keynoted IWD 2026 at the University of Buea, Cameroon. She transitioned into cloud engineering in 2021, bringing over a decade of customer-facing and business leadership experience, a background that gives her a rare dual lens on both the technical and human sides of engineering reliability.
