New York Site Reliability Engineering Tech Talks

This event is co-sponsored by incident.io. Thank you incident.io for your partnership and support of Site Reliability!

The event will take place on Sep 29th 2026, 6-8:30pm at our main building, NYC-9th. IMPORTANT: pls use the 9th ave lobby for the event entry and check-in (corner of 9th Ave and 16th St).
The check-in will start at 5:30pm and talks will start at 6:00pm sharp. Allow sufficient time for commuting and check-in. The building has strict policies for visitors entry, once the lobby is closed, we won’t be able to admit late arrivals.

As always, the talks will be followed by an opportunity to mingle with the speakers and attendees over some light snacks and beverages.
When RSVP'ing to this event, please make sure to enter your full name exactly as it appears on your government issued ID. You will be required to present your ID at check in.

Agenda:

Leo Papaloizos - Product Engineer, incident.io
Don't wait for an outage to improve your reliability

A reliable system isn't just about your infrastructure. Learn to effectively leverage game days to train engineers and build resilience before real incidents force you to.

Leo Papaloizos is currently a Product Engineer at incident.io. She was part of the foundational team that built their On-call product, which thousands of responders use to get paged for their most critical issues. She loves building products that get used daily. Through her experience of building and using an On-call product, she’s developed a particular interest in making what might be the most stressful time of someone’s week the least stressful it can be. In her spare time, she plays football and knits.

Maxine Meurer - Infrastructure Engineer, Sela Cloud
The Demo Always Works: Five Ways Artificial Intelligence Apps Break in Production
Every AI influenced app works in the Dev, or as an LLM explains it, then it gets deployed inside a real network and it breaks in ways that look like three different bugs, that ultimately turn out to be one. This talk is about the infrastructure engineer's view of that gap, drawn from client deployments of production AI stacks on Azure and AWS.
A walk through five real failures: a managed stack where six missing DNS links produced six unrelated-looking outages; a scheduled pipeline that silently stopped because nobody had turned on logging; a chat backend returning 500s behind a perfectly green access log; a bill that grew for months while every dashboard stayed healthy; and the managed versus self-hosted decision, seen from both sides. Each one comes with what it looked like, what it actually was, and the fix.

Maxine Meurer is a cloud infrastructure engineer and consultant at Sela Cloud, where she runs production Azure and AWS environments for clients in regulated industries. She is the author of LLMs for Humans: From Prompts to Production and writes the I Love DevOps newsletter, where she covers production DevOps and AI engineering from real client work rather than demo environments. She went from teacher to DevOps engineer, and most of her writing exists so the next person can do it better. She desires to see others succeed in the DevOps space.

Lesley Cordero - Staff Engineer and Tech Lead, The New York Times
Psychologically Safe Reliability Management
Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.
Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens. We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams.

Lesley Cordero is currently a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead at The New York Times, covering the Site Reliability Engineering organization. She has spent the majority of her career on edtech teams as an engineer, including Google for Education and other edtech startups.
In her current role, she is focused on observability, shared platforms, and building excellent teams by setting reliability vision & strategy across The Times, improving our observability footprint, and cultivating culture that builds with the most vulnerable employees in mind first. She shows care for others by holding them accountable to the best versions of themselves – and by buying them the occasional bubble tea.

Our Tech Talks series are for professional development and networking: no recruiters, sales or press please! Google is committed to providing a harassment-free and inclusive conference experience for everyone, and all participants must follow our Event Community Guidelines. The event will be photographed and video recorded.
Event space is limited! A reservation is required to attend. Reserve your spot today and share the event details with your SRE/DevOps friends 🙂