Ship It Conversations: Meta’s Francois Richard on AI Incident Response, SLOs, and Reliability at Scale

Episode notes

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly , separate from the weekly news recaps. In this Ship It: Conversations episode, I talk with Francois Richard, Engineering Director at Meta, about reliability at scale, how AI is changing production risk, what teams actually learn from incidents, and why recovery practice matters just as much as prevention. We talk about the proactive and reactive sides of reliability, why SLOs should represent a promise to users instead of just another dashboard number, how incident reviews should drive real system improvements, and how teams can practice recovery before production forces the lesson on them. The bigger theme here is that reliability is not just about avoiding failure. It is about knowing what happens when prevention fails. That means practicing regional failure, understanding overload behavior, improving incident response, using AI carefully during investigation, and making reliability targets match the actual lifecycle and importance of the system.

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