By: Alan Shimel
Site reliability engineering has been quietly buckling under its own success. The scope of what SRE teams are expected to own — observability, incident response, telemetry pipelines, capacity, cost, resilience — keeps growing while the tools underneath fragment further. AI is showing up as both the reason the workload keeps expanding and the most credible path to bringing it back under control, but only if agents get built on infrastructure that reliability engineers can actually reason about and trust.
Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo, sat down with Alan Shimel at PlatformCon 2026 to walk through how his team is trying to move that needle in public. Mezmo’s Aura project, released as an open source AI SRE harness, is meant to give teams an opinionated foundation for building agents that reduce toil, process telemetry and support reliability workflows without turning the ops function into a stack of proprietary black boxes. The bet is that reliability work is too high-stakes to be locked inside any single vendor’s agent runtime.
Callaway and Shimel work through the practical pieces that decide whether an AI SRE agent is safe to run. Telemetry pipelines have to feed clean, structured signals rather than raw noise. Agent memory needs to persist and be inspectable so an agent’s prior actions can be audited. Trust and permissions become a first-class concern — an SRE agent with production access is only as good as the guardrails around what it can touch and when. Open source governance is what keeps all of that honest as more organizations adopt the harness.
The bigger shift Callaway sketches is what happens to SREs themselves. Rather than shrinking the discipline, agentic operations pushes reliability engineers up a level — toward architecting how autonomous systems behave, defining the guardrails they operate inside, and owning the reliability contract for a stack that increasingly runs itself. Reliability architects for autonomous systems is the phrase that keeps coming up, and it looks like where the profession is heading.
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