How mid-sized companies can build reliability into their systems without adding headcount or complexity.
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How to Implement Site Reliability Engineering in a Mid-Sized Company (Without Hiring a Full SRE Team)
How mid-sized companies can build reliability into their systems without adding headcount or complexity.
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July 26, 2025
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Not every company needs a full-blown SRE team. But every company needs systems that don’t collapse under pressure.
At some point, downtime becomes more than an inconvenience. It becomes a pattern. A pattern that chips away at trust, both inside and outside the company. Most mid-sized firms feel this shift too late. By the time systems are stretched and the team is scrambling, the damage is already in motion.
This article isn’t a playbook for enterprises. It’s a roadmap for the rest of us. For teams who need reliability, but can’t afford abstraction. For leaders who want clarity, not complexity.
At Syntaxia, we often meet teams caught in a familiar trap. The product is scaling. Customers are growing. Infrastructure is under strain. But the response is still manual. When something breaks, someone fixes it. The cycle repeats. It works...until it doesn’t.
The problem isn’t the absence of heroism. It’s the absence of systems.
Reliability, when treated as an afterthought, always costs more. In missed SLAs. In churn. In engineering morale. SRE thinking shifts the question from "How fast can we fix it?" to "Why did it happen at all?"
That shift matters. Especially for companies who can't afford 24/7 response teams. You need systems that fail gracefully. You need failures that teach. And above all, you need to stop mistaking urgency for effectiveness.
SRE at Google is a large machine. But at its heart are a few powerful ideas. You don’t need the whole machine. You need the leverage.
SLIs and SLOs
Start with what your users experience. Define indicators that reflect reality: request latency, uptime, error rate. Then decide what’s acceptable. Not perfect. Acceptable.
An SLO isn't a dream goal. It's a boundary. It says: "If we operate within this range, users are satisfied. Outside it, something is broken."
Error Budgets
An error budget is a measure of how much unreliability you're willing to tolerate. If your SLO is 99.9% uptime, your error budget is the 0.1% you’re willing to live with.
Why it matters: It gives teams a language for tradeoffs. You don’t need to argue feelings. You look at the data. Are we inside budget? Good. Ship. Outside? Stabilize.
Toil Reduction
Every company has toil. It's the manual, repetitive, reactive work that clogs attention. SRE doesn't try to eliminate it overnight. It names it. Measures it. And chips away at it, piece by piece.
Start tracking how much time your team spends fighting fires. Set a goal: reduce toil by 10% over the next quarter. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It needs to be deliberate.
Incident Reviews
Here’s the hard truth: most postmortems are either too shallow or too defensive. A real incident review is uncomfortable. But necessary.
SRE culture encourages blameless postmortems. Not because blame isn’t real. But because systems are more honest than memories. Write things down. What happened? What did we expect? What broke? What will we do differently?
If you do this well, your worst days become your most valuable data.
Most mid-sized firms can’t hire a team of full-time SREs. And they shouldn’t try. What they can do is embed reliability thinking into the people they already have.
Assign Ownership Thoughtfully
Don’t assign SRE duties to the most overloaded person. Assign them to someone who can think clearly under pressure, who documents patterns, who cares about systemic health.
Create space for them. Let them own small wins: reducing alerts, documenting recovery steps, introducing one metric that matters.
Start with Observability You Can Maintain
If your monitoring setup breaks more often than your app, it’s not helping. Start simple: uptime checks, error rates, log volume. The goal isn’t coverage. It’s insight.
Make Reliability a Visible Priority
Tie SLOs to something the company cares about. Missed revenue. Churn. Customer satisfaction. Then make it part of quarterly OKRs. Not to punish teams, but to give reliability a voice at the table.
Use Runbooks as Decision Tools
A runbook is not just a checklist. It’s a narrative. "If this alert fires, do this first. If that doesn’t work, escalate. If it’s 2AM and you’re unsure, here’s who to call."
Runbooks reduce panic. They scale experience. And they allow your best responders to rest.
Mistaking Tooling for Process
SRE isn’t built with dashboards. It’s built with decisions. Tools can help. But tools without shared judgment become noise. Invest in habits, not just licenses.
Overloading a Small Team with Big Responsibility
If one person is “the SRE” and nothing changes unless they act, you haven’t implemented SRE. You’ve created a new single point of failure.
Treating Reliability as a Blocker
Done poorly, SRE becomes the team that says "no." Done well, it becomes the team that asks "when?" and "at what cost?" Your reliability function should enable progress by making its cost visible.
You can’t outsource culture. But you can accelerate clarity.
We work with teams who are serious about building more resilient systems, but don’t have the time or the structure to get there alone.
Here are signals we look for:
In these moments, an external partner can help create a frame. A rhythm. A way to move from chaos to visibility, from reactivity to strategy.
No system is perfectly reliable. But some systems make failure survivable. Some teams learn from outages. Others repeat them.
SRE isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a discipline. A posture. A set of choices that prioritize clarity over comfort, and resilience over speed.
The good news? You don’t need a new department. You need a new lens. Start where you are. Use what you have. And commit to building systems that don’t need heroes to stay online.
How software architecture captures (and shapes) the culture behind the code.
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