Many engineering teams treat reliability as 'everyone's responsibility.' In practice, that means it's nobody's responsibility. Here's why you need someone whose job is specifically to care about it.

The 'everyone owns it' myth

It sounds great. In reality, every product engineer has a feature deadline. When the deadline competes with reliability work, the deadline wins every time. Reliability becomes the thing you do when you have spare time, which you never do.

Dedicated ownership isn't about gatekeeping. It's about giving someone the explicit job of fighting for reliability against other priorities.

What the role does

1. Watches the metrics everyone else ignores. Error budget burn. Latency drift. Cost per request. These are nobody's priority until something breaks.

2. Runs the unglamorous processes. Post-mortem reviews. SLO tracking. On-call rotation health. The organizational infrastructure of reliability.

3. Says no when needed. A reliability engineer can push back on 'let's ship tonight' when the SLO is already at risk. A feature engineer usually can't.

4. Builds the tools. Runbook templates. Deployment guardrails. Dashboards the team actually uses. Small tools with big leverage.

Who should this person be?

Not your most senior infra engineer (they're too busy). Not a new hire (they don't have the political capital).

Ideally: someone mid-level who has seen at least one real production crisis, has the temperament for maintenance work, and enjoys making other engineers faster.

When to hire

Once you have ~20 engineers and reliability is visibly deteriorating. Not before.

Before 20, the full team can probably handle reliability as part-time work. After 20, the tragedy of the commons kicks in and you need an owner.

The ROI

The ROI of a reliability engineer is easy to miss because their success looks like 'things didn't break.' It's invisible work.

But calculate: what does one major outage cost you in lost revenue, lost sleep, and customer churn? One avoided outage per year pays for the hire several times over.

Hire the reliability engineer. Give them authority. Measure their success in boring stability, not heroic firefighting.

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Written by Dr. Samson Tanimawo
BSc · MSc · MBA · PhD
Founder & CEO, Nova AI Ops. https://novaaiops.com