About
I am an SRE/Platform Engineer, Engineering Leadership practitioner and Coach based in Dublin, Ireland.
I'm currently VP of Engineering at Astronomer, where I drive Reliability, Automation, and amplify general good sense across Engineering.
Previous to this, I did some freelancing as a technologist leadership consultant and coach for a few years. Co-Servant Systems was my practice (now defunct). For coaching, see Strategic Hopes which I still do if you ask nicely.
Previous to that, I was VP of Engineering at Twilio, working on reliability strategery and leading the SRE group there.
Previous to that, I was Sr. Director of Engineering at elastic.co, building and scaling Elastic Cloud.
I was a Site Reliability Engineer/Manager/Director at Google from 2004 to 2021. As well as technical and management/leadership work on products such as GMail and Google Analytics, I was the global lead for Storage and Databases SRE at Google, as well as the head of Engineering at Google Ireland for several years.
I hold various opinions about technology, building and keeping teams and organisations, the role of SRE/Devops/whatever the kool kids are calling it, and various other things. I have run orgs from individual teams up to orgs of 300+ engineers, managers and other functions.
I was responsible for the first and second Reddit AMAs participated in by SRE, and have given various talks, presentations, etc. externally about what Google Engineering, and specifically SRE, do. I'm the author of chapter 29 of the SRE Book.
Speaking/Interviewing
I am happy to speak on subjects such as Software Resiliency, Customer Management for SaaS (internal and external), SRE history and development, Platform Engineering, OKRs, Managing Distributed Teams, Performance Management, Coaching high-level engineers and managers, Interrupts, on-call, incident management, and anything else that falls inside the realm of interesting and where I might have something interesting to say.
If in doubt, get in contact via LinkedIn or Mastodon or any of the various ways that can be figured out. I don't want any paid consulting opportunities in the area of [insert search term here], so stop being weird please.
Previous Talks, Panels and Interviews (an incomplete list):
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‘You should automate yourself out of a job every 18 months’ - Irish Times Feature on my team at Google, featuring interview with me (print and online), July 2018
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SRECon Europe 2015 - Bad Machinery— Managing Interrupts Under Load
- SRECon 2021 - SRE "Power Words"—the Lexicon of SRE as an Industry
- SRECon EMEA 2022 - Oncall: An Equal Opportunity Waste of Time
- SRECon EMEA 2023 - Panel Discussion: Unraveling the Interoperability Challenges Among SaaS Products
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SRECon EMEA 2024 - SRE Stakeholders: A Spotter’s Guide (video)
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Practical Guide to More Effective Mentorship - Software Misadventures Podcast, January 2024 (Covers coaching/mentoring and Early Google Stories)
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Capability vs. Intent in the AI Gold Rush - AI Builder Podcast, June 2026
Writing
Most of my writings can be found on this site -- many of these are vetted versions of papers/essays I wrote for various employers and are used internally there.
- Dealing With Interrupts - Chapter 29 of "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems" by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy
- Oncall: An Equal-Opportunity Waste of Time - USENIX ;login: Online
- Oncall with Dave O'Connor from the Fiberplane Blog
- Working Deliberately with OKRs - A primer for folks about to or considering OKRs, and how I use them.
- Invent More, Toil Less - USENIX ;login: (With Betsy Beyer, Brendan Gleason, Vivek Rau) - On real-life toil reduction.
- Everybody's Free (To Use Their Best Judgment) - A note to new engineers.
- Conferences for Introverts - A guide for someone who will run a conference at which there might be introverts.
- Bad Machinery: Managing Interrupts Under Load - On managing teams that manage interrupts. Later became a chapter in the first SRE book.
- 6 Reasons You Don't need an SRE Team - A 2023 take on whether your average company or enterprise needs an SRE team, as opposed to just SRE practices or mindset.
- Production, SRE and the Architecture of the Built Environment - On comparisons between old-meaning architecture and how kind we are to ourselves as builders of ecosystems. Also Presented at Dublin SRE Meetup in 2024
- What is Reliability Engineering? - Guest post on Gergely Orosz' Pragmatic Engineer newsletter.
Other Media, Quotes Etc.
- I'm quoted "from the field" in the 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report
- My 6 Reasons... article is referenced and quoted in the excellent "Platform Engineering" By Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland
Conference/Speaking Materials
The above image can be used as a headshot, if I give permission in writing. Yes, I need a new headshot.
The following blurb is current as of mid-2026 and can be used as a bio for interviews, talks, and so on -- please check with me first.
Dave O'Connor is a software practitioner based in Dublin, Ireland. Dave has spent over 20 years building the foundational systems and teams that power much of the world's storage and data. At Google, he led the SRE teams that covered all of Google's Storage and Databases, was involved in the development of the SRE profession as a whole, and helped build Google's Engineering office in Dublin to over 800 engineers. Since then, he has managed and built world-scale SaaS and PaaS systems for Elastic, Twilio and most recently Astronomer. At Astronomer, he is VP of Engineering, building the world's data operating system based on Apache Airflow.