Engagements
How engagements are structured, what’s included at each shape, and how they start. For a specific situation, get in touch and we’ll talk.
Scoped diagnostic day — $2,500
Fixed price, fixed scope. A written diagnostic with prioritized recommendations, delivered within one week of the working session.
What I need from you: access to the relevant artifacts — incident history, PagerDuty data, alert definitions, postmortems, rotation docs, architecture diagrams, depending on the shape — plus 30–60 minutes with 1–3 people during the day.
What you receive: a written diagnostic, scored or rubric-based where appropriate, with specific prioritized recommendations. Delivered as a single document you can circulate internally.
Named shapes
- On-Call Audit — PagerDuty data + alert definitions + on-caller interviews → page-load map, actionable/noise ratio, rotation recommendations.
- Postmortem Corpus Review — 5–10 recent postmortems → scored against a blameless/actionable/followed-up rubric, with the patterns you keep repeating.
- AI-Coding Adoption Risk Assessment — current workflow + sample PRs → gap analysis across review, testing, supply-chain, and deployment.
- Incident Command Diagnostic — last 6 months of incidents + current IM process → gap analysis and prioritized changes.
- Observability Gap Analysis — one critical user journey + current instrumentation → mapping against golden signals, blind spots, minimum instrumentation plan.
- SLO Candidate Draft — one user journey + product priorities → 2–3 candidate SLOs with an error budget policy.
- Production Readiness Review — one launching service + its docs → scored against a PRR checklist with blockers and waivers.
Other shapes on request.
Retainers
Ongoing access to principal-level SRE judgment. Three shapes; pick the one that matches the shape of the problem.
Advisory — 2 days/month, $4,800
For teams that need a principal-level sounding board on architecture, incident process, and hiring without day-to-day involvement.
Fractional — 4 days/month, $9,200
For teams doing active reliability work that needs principal judgment in the loop — escalations, design reviews, postmortem facilitation.
Embedded — 8 days/month, $17,600
For teams standing up a reliability practice or navigating a structural change where more sustained presence is warranted.
All retainers: three-month minimum; month-to-month after.
Specialized engagements
Scoped to the work; quoted against a written proposal.
- Incident facilitation — running incident reviews and postmortems, delivering the written artifacts your team will reuse.
- On-call restructuring — rotation design, escalation policy, alert rationalization, comp structure.
- Observability adoption — vendor selection, instrumentation strategy, migration plans.
- SRE practice standup — establishing SRE as a function: charter, scope, hiring signal, relationship to dev teams.
- AI-augmented development workflow — review doctrine, supply-chain hygiene, and testing practices for teams shipping LLM-generated code.
How I work
Kickoff. After the intro call, I send a short written proposal with scope, deliverables, dates, and price. Work begins once it’s countersigned.
Cadence. Scoped days are one focused working session plus writeup. Retainers have a standing check-in cadence agreed at kickoff.
Deliverables. I write rather than deck. Every engagement produces at least one written artifact you own and can circulate.
Scope. Senior-IC only. I solve problems your current team can’t yet solve. I don’t ship feature code, write runbooks, or carry a pager. If your need is implementation capacity, I can help you hire for it.
Questions
Does a scoped day apply toward a retainer?
Remote or on-site? Remote-first.
Payment terms?
NDAs and conflicts? I’ll sign a standard mutual NDA. Conflicts declared up front.