Implement the concept of Standing Squads to the Reliability Team

Why is this change being made?

A big challenge for SREs old and new is trying to understand all of the different areas that the team is responsible for. To address this, the Reliability Team has been exploring options for deploying SREs in a more specialized way. In reviewing our backlog it is clear that we have plenty of great ideas for improving our services, but we're rarely able to prioritize these issues in a way that winds up being helpful to the organization.

Current Configuration

Our current configuration, while allowing for flexibility, does have some downsides:

• No built-in method for improving. Our only way to improve as it stand is to spin up a new project squad. We tend to do this only as a reaction to when things get really bad.
• Small improvements that could lead to toil reduction are never worked on.
• There is nothing within the current structure that narrows the scope of responsibility for the Reliability Team in any way. All SREs on the Reliability are expected to have at operational knowledge of every service and this scope continues to grow.

Proposed Configuration

With this configuration we introduce the idea of an Observability Squad and a Reliability Foundations Squad. The goal is to realize the following benefits:

• Standing resources dedicated to service improvement for Observability and Reliability Platform related work
• Begins to narrow the scope of responsibility for Reliability SREs. As we continue to grow the team we should think about how we can recalibrate how alerts are handled across the team, this is the first step towards that.

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