This talk covers how we hire and run SRE, DevOps, and TechOps teams by treating infrastructure like a supply chain. Looking at systems this way makes bottlenecks, risk, and capacity limits easier to see before they cause outages. I’ll explain what we look for when hiring, how we expect engineers to operate day to day, and how this approach helps us define the right metrics early instead of after incidents.
Bryan Patton is Director of Site Reliability and TechOps at Xurrent, where he leads global reliability engineering, operational excellence including architecture and performance monitoring, and incident response practices for modern cloud environments.
Bryan previously directed a high-performance ecosystem engineered to handle massive surges in real-time sports data, consistently managing traffic loads exceeding millions of requests per second. He oversaw the scaling of cloud-native systems and low-latency databases to ensure 99.9% uptime during peak global sporting events, where millisecond-level precision is critical for user engagement. By implementing robust automated scaling protocols and optimizing distributed cache layers, they successfully balanced extreme throughput with system resilience and cost-efficiency in a high-stakes, data-intensive environment.
