Keep production
up and honest.
I'm Derrick Johnson, a Staff-level Site Reliability Engineer. For 18+ years I've built the monitoring, SLOs, and incident response that keep large-scale systems reliable — at LinkedIn, HP Cloud, eHarmony, and Lockheed Martin. Now I bring that to your team.
18+ years keeping production reliable at
What I do
Reliability, treated as an engineering discipline — not a fire drill.
Every engagement is scoped to leave your team more capable than when I arrived. No lock-in, no proprietary black boxes — just durable practices your engineers own.
Reliability Audits
A clear-eyed assessment of where your systems will break — monitoring gaps, missing SLOs, fragile architecture, on-call that burns people out. You get a prioritized, effort-scored roadmap, not a 60-page PDF nobody reads.
- SPOF & architecture review
- Alerting & on-call health
- Effort-scored roadmap
Observability & SLOs
Dashboards and alerts wired to symptoms your users actually feel, plus SLOs and error budgets that turn 'is it down?' arguments into data. Built with tools you already run — Prometheus, Grafana, the ELK stack, or your cloud's native suite.
- SLIs/SLOs per user journey
- Signal-based alerting
- Error-budget policy
Incident Response
The runbooks, escalation paths, and postmortem culture that turn a 3am page from chaos into a checklist. I've built next-generation observability and triage tooling for teams operating thousands of servers across time zones.
- Runbooks & escalation
- Blameless postmortems
- On-call rotation design
Automation & Tooling
Custom automation that removes toil: auto-remediation, self-healing restarts, and CI/CD that ships safely. From Java/Kotlin services to Python operational tooling and Terraform-managed infrastructure.
- Auto-remediation
- CI/CD hardening
- Infra as code (Terraform)
Track record
The systems I've kept online.
I've operated at the scale where reliability isn't optional — hundreds of millions of users, thousands of servers, teams spanning continents. That's the judgment I bring to your production.
- 18+
- Years in production
- 3,000+
- Servers managed
- M.S.
- IT, Carnegie Mellon
- 15+
- Recognition awards
LinkedIn— Staff Site Reliability Engineer
2016 — PresentLed the Next-Generation Observability Platform for advanced monitoring, alerting, and triage. Owned SLAs for the GMA team and built Python tooling to run seamless US↔Bangalore SRE handoffs. 15+ Special Recognition Awards.
Kubernetes · Elasticsearch · Neo4j · Kotlin · Terraform
eHarmony— Senior DevOps Engineer
2014 — 2016Managed 3,000+ Linux servers. Built a Rails + Jenkins pipeline orchestrating CI/CD for Java apps, and authored the NOC runbooks that let first-line support restore production fast.
Chef · Jenkins · OpenStack · Java
HP Cloud— Senior Software Engineer
2012 — 2014Built the monitoring product that let customers track load, CPU, and custom metrics on cloud VMs and act before resources were exhausted. Ran a highly-available RabbitMQ cluster and Nagios-based health checks.
Dropwizard · OpenStack · Kafka · RabbitMQ
Lockheed Martin— Software Engineer (ELDP)
2005 — 2011Engineering Leadership Development Program. Built single-sign-on auth, backup/recovery for multi-OS environments, and automation keeping 2,000+ Unix/Linux/Mac machines correctly configured.
Java · LDAP · Kerberos · Linux
Engagements
Fixed-price packages. Pay securely to get started.
Every package has a defined scope and a defined price. Payment is handled by Stripe — your card details never touch this site.
Discovery Call
A focused 60-minute strategy session to pinpoint your biggest reliability risks.
- 60 minutes, 1:1 with a Staff-level SRE
- Review of your on-call, alerting & incident process
- A prioritized list of quick wins you can action now
- Fee credited toward any engagement within 30 days
Reliability Audit
A fixed-scope assessment of your production systems with a concrete remediation roadmap.
- Deep review of monitoring, alerting, SLOs & on-call
- Architecture & single-point-of-failure analysis
- Written report with effort-scored recommendations
- 90-minute readout with your engineering team
Observability & SLO Setup
Stand up monitoring, dashboards, and SLOs that catch problems before your customers do.
- SLIs/SLOs defined for your critical user journeys
- Dashboards & alerts wired to symptoms, not noise
- Error-budget policy & on-call runbook templates
- Hands-on implementation alongside your team
Fractional SRE Retainer
Ongoing, senior reliability leadership embedded with your team — month to month.
- Dedicated hours each month for reliability work
- Incident response & postmortem facilitation
- Roadmap ownership for observability & resilience
- Scope tailored to your stage — let's talk first
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How we work together
Predictable process. Predictable price.
Discovery call
We spend 60 focused minutes on your systems, your pain, and your goals. You leave with quick wins whether or not we work together.
Scoped proposal
I send a fixed-price proposal with clear deliverables and a timeline. No open-ended hourly meters, no surprises on the invoice.
Hands-on work
I work alongside your engineers — pairing, reviewing, and building — so the knowledge stays in-house after I leave.
Handoff & follow-up
You get documentation, runbooks, and a readout. I stay reachable to make sure what we built keeps holding up.
Questions
Before you book.
Do you work remotely?
Yes — engagements are remote-first. I've spent years coordinating reliability work across US and international teams, so async collaboration and clear handoffs are second nature.
What tools and stacks do you work with?
I'm tool-agnostic and meet you where you are: Kubernetes, Prometheus/Grafana, the Elastic stack, Terraform, and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud). I write in Java, Kotlin, Python, and Ruby. If you're on something niche, I've probably operated it or something like it.
Is the discovery call fee refundable?
The discovery call is credited toward any larger engagement you book within 30 days — so if we move forward, it effectively costs nothing.
How does payment work?
Fixed-price packages are paid up front through Stripe's secure checkout. Larger or ongoing work (like the fractional retainer) is scoped on a call first and invoiced. Your card details are handled entirely by Stripe and never touch this website.
Can you help during an active incident?
For existing clients, yes. For new relationships I generally start with an audit or discovery call so I understand your systems before there's a fire — that's when the help is most valuable.
Let's talk
Your systems shouldn't keep you up at night.
Book a discovery call and let's find the reliability wins hiding in your stack — or email me directly and tell me what's breaking.