Lessons from an Asset Manager's First Embedded SRE

Learn how to successfully embed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices within a financial services organization through this 28-minute conference talk from SREcon25 Europe/Middle East/Africa. Discover practical strategies for implementing SRE in environments with zero tolerance for delays, where traditional approaches like error budgets and SLO-based alerting prove incompatible with business requirements. Explore how BlackRock's first embedded SRE initiative transformed their decentralized operational model by working directly within a key trading systems engineering team to drive operational accountability and align with organizational objectives. Examine the unique constraints faced in financial services and learn how to adapt standard SRE practices, including reshaping alerting around practical telemetry and revitalizing incident retrospectives to extract actionable insights. Understand the process of building trust between SRE and engineering teams, reducing incidents significantly over a 12-month period without requiring additional headcount. Gain insights into fostering sustainable reliability culture, delivering immediate value, and navigating the challenges of embedding SRE practices in highly regulated, mission-critical environments where system delays can have severe financial implications.