Marianne Bellotti, Bloomberg Government, and Lorin Hochstein, Airbnb
Nobody knows what this code does. That service was never instrumented correctly. The runbook is stale and out of date. When the incident is over but the system is still broken, what happens next? The gap between the SRE ideal and the SRE reality can be wide, and once an incident is marked “resolved,” the work required to prevent the next one can feel overwhelming or even impossible. Join facilitators Marianne Bellotti and Lorin Hochstein for a discussion on how to tackle persistent, long-term operational problems and what it takes to rescue failing systems.
Marianne Bellotti is a software engineer who specializes in restoring legacy systems to operational excellence. She's the author of the bestselling book on the topic: Kill It With Fire. As part of the original United States Digital Service she responded to incidents at the State Department, the IRS, the Department of Defense, among others. Prior to federal service she worked for the United Nations on data sharing during ongoing humanitarian crises. She's currently focusing on the application of formal logic in triage and incident response, including developing the modeling language Fault.
Lorin Hochstein is a Staff Software Engineer, Reliability at Airbnb. He was previously Senior Staff Software Engineer at Coupang, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, Senior Software Engineer at SendGrid Labs, Lead Architect for Cloud Services at Nimbis Services, Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Lorin has a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from McGill University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Boston University, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is also a proud member of the Resilience in Software Foundation and the Resilience Engineering Association.
author = {Marianne Bellotti and Lorin Hochstein},
title = {System Rescue: Restoring Operational Excellence},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}