How do we maintain confidence that we genuinely understand our systems in an increasingly AI-driven world?
Speaker
Mark Ellens
Agenda
6.30pm - Event start
8.00pm - Event close
Synopsis
The SNAFUcatchers Above-The-Line / Below-The-Line framework argues that engineers never interact directly with the systems they build and operate; instead, we interact with representations: dashboards, alerts, logs, tests, architecture diagrams, runbooks and mental models. The real system remains below the line. For years, Site Reliability Engineering has focused on improving these representations through observability, post-incident reviews and operational feedback loops, but AI changes the equation. Not because AI introduces entirely new reliability challenges, but because it dramatically increases the rate at which systems evolve and therefore the distance between implementation and understanding. Generated code, generated tests, AI reviewers and AI-powered quality gates all create new layers of representation between engineers and the systems they are trying to understand.
This talk explores how ideas from SRE, Capability Engineering and validation-driven engineering can help organisations maintain confidence in an increasingly AI-assisted world. We'll examine why reliability is ultimately a problem of shared understanding, why organisational capability depends on validating that understanding, and why the future of SRE may be less about managing infrastructure and more about continuously testing whether our beliefs about a system are actually true.
About the speaker
Mark Ellens is a platform engineering and reliability consultant with over 20 years' experience helping organisations modernise complex systems, improve engineering effectiveness, and build resilient cloud-native platforms. His work spans platform engineering, AWS cloud architecture, modernisation strategy, SRE/reliability practices, and developer experience, with a particular focus on reducing cognitive load and enabling teams to deliver safely and effectively at scale. He has worked across retail, finance, government, and data-intensive environments, combining hands-on technical delivery with strategic consulting, architecture guidance, and operational improvement.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mellens/
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