When given the opportunity to build a software engineering organisation from scratch, our vision was relatively solid — our structure solved many pain points we knew from earlier experiments. We had found a good balance between the people we could sustainably hire, the budget, and the products our research colleagues in a life science company needed. The thing we didn't have was a sustainable answer to: what do we do when we need to create more products and can't grow the staff linearly?
We had worked with external partners in those situations before, but we kept thinking we could keep strategic products in better shape if we didn't have to hand them off — if we kept them in the teams that built them. SRE came up internally as the answer to the hardest part of that — operations eating the team. We framed the proposal as an experiment, and that framing got our product peers' buy-in. This talk is told from two sides of that experiment: the manager who proposed it and built the engineering organization, and the engineer who became the first SRE and shaped what the practice looked like inside the product teams. Teams were designed for independence — kept apart so each could move at its own speed. The surprise after three years: in an organisation built for vertical independence, the SREs became the horizontal connection — carrying not just reliability work but communication, synergies, even capacity relief between teams.
Katharina Burckhardt is a platform and reliability engineer based in Cologne with 8 years experience across cloud engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and Site Reliability Engineering. Most recently in life science research IT, she designed and embedded an SRE practice across product teams, built reusable infrastructure modules, and led training programs on cloud and reliability topics. She works on the practitioner side of SRE — embedding reliability culture into product teams and making SRE principles a daily practice rather than a separate discipline.
Thomas Leyer is an engineering leader based in Cologne with 25 years in IT spanning systems engineering, scientific computing, DevOps, and engineering leadership. Most recently in life science research IT, he built a platform engineering team from the ground up and introduced Site Reliability Engineering as a function co-owning production with product teams. He works at the intersection of engineering practice and organizational design, with a particular interest in how organisations enable experimentation at every level — code, product, and the shape of the organisation itself.
