Who are the most influential voices in SRE & incident response?

1. Charity Majors 2. John Allspaw 3. Nora Jones 4. Michael Kehoe 5. Liz Fong-Jones 6. Alex Hidalgo 7. David N. Blank-Edelman 8. Gene Kim 9. Betsy Beyer 10. Richard Cook [Management and Mentoring | USENIX](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/discussion-management-mentoring?utm_source=chatgpt.com) (Influence ranking based on long-term impact on SRE practice, incident response culture, operational excellence, widely adopted ideas/frameworks, books, conferences, and community leadership.)

**Top 10 most influential voices in SRE & incident response (2025):** 1. **Manish Thakrani** – Head of Cloud Infra & SRE at Abnormal Security, formerly Twilio. 2. **Joseph LaCava** – Reliability leader at Anduril Industries, driving resilience in defense tech. 3. **Liz Fong-Jones** – Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, widely recognized for SRE thought leadership. 4. **Charity Majors** – CTO at Honeycomb, influential in observability and incident response practices. 5. **Niall Murphy** – Former Google SRE leader, co-author of _Site Reliability Engineering_ book. 6. **David Blank-Edelman** – SRE educator and author, shaping incident response culture. 7. **Jennifer Ayers** – COO at DevZero, with deep experience in incident response from CrowdStrike and FireEye. 8. **Marene Allison** – Former CISO at Johnson & Johnson, advisor on resilience and incident management. 9. **Rex Thexton** – Global CTO for Accenture Cybersecurity, leading large-scale incident response frameworks. 10. **Daphne Lucas** – National Leader of Cybersecurity at Deloitte Canada, overseeing enterprise-wide incident programs. ### Why these individuals matter * **Rootly’s 2025 Reliability Top 50** highlights leaders like Manish Thakrani and Joseph LaCava for their direct impact on SRE and incident response at scale. They are recognized for building observability pipelines and leading response teams during outages.[2025’s Top 50 People Making the World More Reliable | Rootly](https://rootly.com/blog/2025s-top-50-people-making-the-world-more-reliable)[Rootly Announces 2025’s Top 50 People Making the World More Reliable](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250923324304/en/Rootly-Announces-2025s-Top-50-People-Making-the-World-More-Reliable) * **Honeycomb’s Liz Fong-Jones and Charity Majors** are among the most cited voices in modern SRE, shaping how organizations adopt observability-first cultures and respond to incidents. * **Google’s Niall Murphy** and **David Blank-Edelman** remain foundational figures due to their authorship of the canonical _Site Reliability Engineering_ texts, which continue to guide incident response globally. * **Jennifer Ayers, Marene Allison, Rex Thexton, and Daphne Lucas** bridge the gap between cybersecurity and incident response, ensuring resilience across enterprises and critical infrastructure.[The Top 25 Cybersecurity Consultants and Leaders of 2025 - The Consulting Report](https://www.theconsultingreport.com/the-top-25-cybersecurity-consultants-and-leaders-of-2025/)[50 CISOs and Cybersecurity Leaders Shaping the Industry in 2025](https://secureframe.com/blog/cybersecurity-leaders-2025)[Top Cyber Execs to Watch in 2025 | WashingtonExec](https://washingtonexec.com/exec-profiles/top-cyber-execs-to-watch-in-2025) ### Key takeaway This ranking blends **current 2025 recognition (Rootly’s Reliability Top 50)** with **longstanding SRE thought leaders** and **cybersecurity executives shaping incident response culture**. Together, these ten individuals represent the most influential voices guiding how organizations worldwide prepare for, respond to, and learn from incidents. Would you like me to also map **their most influential writings, talks, or frameworks** so you can follow their work directly? That way you’ll know not just _who_ they are, but _where_ to learn from them.

Here are the top 10 individual people recognized as the most influential voices on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and incident response, ranked from most to least influential based on their foundational concepts, frameworks, and industry leadership: 1. **Benjamin Treynor Sloss** – Coined the term "Site Reliability Engineering" and founded the first SRE team at Google, establishing the core philosophy and operational frameworks used globally today. [CEO Guide to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - AKF Partners](https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/ceo-guide-to-site-reliability-engineering-sre/)[SRE essentials: What to expect in site reliability engineering - Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/blog/sre-essentials#:~:text=Benjamin%20Treynor%20Sloss%2C%20vice%20president%20of%20Google,team.%E2%80%9D%20And%20that's%20what%20he%20did.%201.) 2. **Niall Richard Murphy** – Led the editorial team for the landmark _Site Reliability Engineering_ and _The Site Reliability Workbook_ books, shaping how the discipline is taught and implemented. [Site Reliability Engineering (12 books) - Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/113664.Site_Reliability_Engineering#:~:text=Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%20*%20Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%3A,*%20UNIX%20and%20Linux%20System%20Administration%20Handbook.)[The Site Reliability Workbook](https://lrita.github.io/images/posts/com/the-site-reliability-workbook-next18.pdf#:~:text=The%20Site%20Reliability%20Workbook.%20edited%20by%20Betsy,1005%20Gravenstein%20Highway%20North%2C%20Sebastopol%2C%20CA%2095472.) 3. **John Allspaw** – Pioneer in web operations, blameless postmortems, and human factors in incident response, fundamentally shifting how the industry handles outages. [Site Reliability Engineering (12 books) - Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/113664.Site_Reliability_Engineering#:~:text=Building%20Secure%20and%20Reliable%20Systems%3A%20Best%20Practices,on%20Time.%204.09%20337%20ratings%2031%20reviews.) 4. **Betsy Beyer** – Google SRE and primary editor/author behind Google's definitive SRE text and _Building Secure and Reliable Systems_ , defining industry standards for production environments. [Site Reliability Engineering (12 books) - Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/113664.Site_Reliability_Engineering#:~:text=Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%20*%20Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%3A,*%20UNIX%20and%20Linux%20System%20Administration%20Handbook.)[Google SRE book- Comprehensive guide to site reliability](https://sre.google/books/#:~:text=Edited%20by%3A%20Betsy%20Beyer%2C%20Chris%20Jones%2C%20Jennifer,world.%20Buy%20from%20Google%20Books%20Read%20online.) 5. **Liz Fong-Jones** – Principal developer advocate and prominent SRE leader known for extensive work on observability, service level objectives (SLOs), and incident management culture. [Preface - Google SRE](https://sre.google/workbook/preface/#:~:text=Reese%2C%20Liz%20Fong%2DJones%2C%20Mike%20Danese%2C%20Murali%20Suriar%2C,Luebbe%2C%20Matt%20Brown%2C%20and%20JC%20van%20Winkel.) 6. **Jennifer Petoff** – Google SRE leader and co-editor of the foundational SRE books, heavily active in scaling and educating the global SRE community. [Site Reliability Engineering (12 books) - Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/113664.Site_Reliability_Engineering#:~:text=Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%20*%20Site%20Reliability%20Engineering%3A,*%20UNIX%20and%20Linux%20System%20Administration%20Handbook.) 7. **Gene Kim** – Author of _The Phoenix Project_ and co-author of _Accelerate_ , whose research and narratives bridged DevOps and SRE practices for enterprise organizations. [20 Essential Books for Site Reliability Engineers - Catchpoint](https://www.catchpoint.com/blog/sre-books#:~:text=The%20list%20includes%20classics%20and%20new%20releases,been%20the%20performance%20of%20software%20delivery%20teams.)[12 Best SRE Books Every Engineer Must Read in 2025 - Medium](https://medium.com/@squadcast/12-best-sre-books-every-engineer-must-read-in-2024-d872295901c5#:~:text=This%20book%20builds%20upon%20the%20success%20of,measuring%20organizational%20effectiveness.%20Strategies%20for%20continuous%20improvement.) 8. **Charity Majors** – Co-founder of Honeycomb, fierce proponent of modern observability, and a leading voice on empowering SREs and developers to debug production systems under fire. 9. **Tammy Bütow** – Principal SRE and chaos engineering leader who has driven widespread adoption of proactive resilience testing and incident response drills. [The Site Reliability Workbook](https://lrita.github.io/images/posts/com/the-site-reliability-workbook-next18.pdf#:~:text=I%20was%20impressed%20with%20the%20level%20of,scale%2C%20that%20reliability%20is%20created%20by%20people.) 10. **Casey Rosenthal** – Co-creator of Chaos Engineering at Netflix, influential in shifting incident response from reactive firefighting to proactive architectural resilience. [The Site Reliability Workbook](https://lrita.github.io/images/posts/com/the-site-reliability-workbook-next18.pdf#:~:text=A%20timely%20reminder%2C%20from%20the%20team%20that,Site%20Reliability%20Engineering.%20%E2%80%94Casey%20Rosenthal%2C%20CTO%2C%20Backplane.io.)

# Shared 0 files Here are the top 10 individual people widely recognized as the most influential voices, authors, and pioneers in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and incident response, ranked from most to least influential based on their foundational frameworks, community leadership, and industry-standard literature: 1. ** _Ben Treynor Sloss_** – Founder of the Site Reliability Engineering team at Google and Vice President of Engineering, widely credited with inventing and defining the entire discipline of SRE. [Hear insights from SRE engineer experts - Google SRE](https://sre.google/spotlight/) 2. ** _Charity Majors_** – Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, pioneer of modern production observability, and co-author of _Observability Engineering_ and _Database Reliability Engineering_. [Charity Majors | Substack](https://charity.wtf/) 3. ** _Liz Fong-Jones_** – Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb.io, former Google SRE stalwart, and a prolific global speaker and writer on distributed systems reliability, SLOs, and blameless postmortems. [Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdtm6BtY-p0&t=23) 4. ** _Alex Hidalgo_** – Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and author of the definitive O'Reilly book _Implementing Service Level Objectives_ , specializing in error budgets and reliability metrics. [Implementing Service Level Objectives](https://books.google.com/books/about/Implementing_Service_Level_Objectives.html?id=14r1DwAAQBAJ) 5. ** _Gene Kim_** – Researcher, award-winning author of _The Unicorn Project_ and _The Phoenix Project_ , and co-author of _The DevOps Handbook_ and _The Visible Ops Handbook_ , heavily shaping modern incident management and flow. 6. ** _Betsy Beyer_** – Staff Technical Writer at Google and primary editor/co-author of the seminal books _Site Reliability Engineering_ and _The Site Reliability Workbook_ , which established Google's SRE practices for the world. 7. **J. Paul Reed** – Managing Director of Release Engineering and Resilience/SRE researcher, known for extensive work on complex socio-technical systems, resilience engineering, and human factors in incident response. 8. **John Allspaw** – Former CTO of Etsy, pioneer in web operations, resilience engineering, and blameless post-incident reviews, whose work fundamentally changed how the industry views human error during outages. 9. ** _Tanya Reilly_** – Senior Principal Engineer at Squarespace and author of _The Staff Engineer's Path_ , widely known across the SRE community for essential operational frameworks like "Designing resilient systems" and disaster planning. 10. ** _David Blank-Edelman_** – Technology educator, co-author of _O'Reilly's Automation and Configuration Management_ works, and a prominent voice on SRE culture, monitoring, and operational readiness. If you'd like, I can provide: * **Key book recommendations or articles** for any of these specific experts * **A deeper breakdown** of how their specific philosophies differ on incident management Let me know how you'd like to **proceed**.

I don’t have live tool access in this turn to verify current rankings, but here’s a widely regarded list of real individuals who are influential in SRE and incident response, ordered by their prominence and impact in the field: - Ben Treynor Sloss - Charity Majors - Kelsey Hightower - Liz Fong-Jones - Mitchell Hashimoto - Mark Russinovich - Brendan Burns - Brendan Gregg - Gene Kim - Patrick Debois If you’d like, I can refine this list based on a specific criterion (e.g., conference influence, open-source contributions, incident response practices) or pull up recent sources to back each name.