SRE: Hand On-Call to the Developers

Salikh Fakhrutdinov is a principal engineer in T-Bank product origination. Across eighteen years in tech he moved from FreeBSD, game servers, and PHP to leading development. He earned an aircraft-design degree and a Master of Sport title in weightlifting, and first programmed to automate calculations.

After eight years at his first company and a medical startup, Salikh completed an SRE course and joined T-Bank as a senior engineer in 2021. Solving traffic, database, and availability-system problems led to a principal role. A lead tackles difficult team problems; a principal spreads processes across teams without formal authority.

Seven SRE engineers support more than six hundred people, roughly 280 services, 210 PostgreSQL databases, and more than 300 topics. Developers take daytime on-call shifts and experience release consequences; SRE covers production around the clock. The team combines enabling, stream-aligned, and platform traits while building automation tools.

Reliability begins before production: SRE reviews RFCs and raises metrics, failures, and recovery. The discussion covers consistency, redundancy, retry cascades, exercises, and observability. Salikh advises engineers to find problems, make results visible, and learn in the context of a task that needs solving.