Jessica Johnson and Chris Alexander, Major League Baseball
In professional sports, a "timeout" is strategic, but "downtime" is a disaster. At Major League Baseball, SRE covers the whole field – ensuring real-time data integrity for millions of fans and powering the critical on-field technology that impacts every play. This session goes beyond the dugout to reveal how we built a Major League SRE practice from the ground up. We will share our journey of rebuilding trust through psychological safety, how we "score the game" using advanced SLOs, and how we are now moving to the offensive as we approach Opening Day. Join us for a look at the unique hurdles of sports tech and walk away with a gameplan for fielding a championship-caliber SRE team.
Jessica Johnson is the Senior Director of Site Reliability Engineering at Major League Baseball, a tenacious leader who drives the adoption of reliability best practices at MLB through education, enablement and engagement. Recent accomplishments include leading teams to deliver over 300 reliability improvements in one quarter, and establishing the Operational Excellence program to empower leaders to reflect on SLOs and incident data. She is dedicated to building a psychologically safe culture where mistakes are learning opportunities and where information is democratized to support growth and innovation.
Chris Alexander is an Engineering Manager and Technical Lead for the Baseball Data Platform at Major League Baseball. Operating at the intersection of real-time sports analytics and high-availability infrastructure, Chris architects the pipelines behind MLB’s Emmy Award-winning Statcast system. He is responsible for delivering the critical, low-latency live game data that powers global broadcasts and sportsbooks. Beyond the tech stack, Chris leads MLB’s Learning From Incidents program, championing a blameless culture that prioritizes resilient systems over assigning fault.
author = {Jessica Johnson and Chris Alexander},
title = {Reliability in the Big Leagues: How {SRE} Powers {America{\textquoteright}s} Pastime},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
