Ship it! with Daniel Hobe

Daniel Hobe, SRE leader for Search, Geo, and DeepMind at Google, joins hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler to discuss the unique engineering and cultural challenges of maintaining reliability for products with billions of users.

This episode explores the evolution of release processes—from traditional canary gating and A/B testing to the complexities of monitoring non-deterministic AI models and generative features.

The discussion highlights a shift in modern SRE: moving beyond abstract SLO percentages to measure real human impact, ensuring that engineering decisions remain tightly aligned with business goals and user experience. Hobe also offers an inspiring perspective on how AI can serve as an engineering enabler to tackle long-standing technical debt and enhance system resilience.

Whether you're scaling traditional infrastructure or navigating the new paradigm of AI-driven products, this episode offers essential lessons on risk management, observability, and customer-centric engineering. Join us as we kick off our seventh season!