DevOps, SRE & AI-era infrastructure talks for technical audiences.
Brian Teller speaks to conferences, engineering teams, and technical communities about the operational reality behind modern infrastructure: AI-assisted delivery, platform engineering, reliability, cloud governance, and the judgment those decisions actually require.
- Conference keynoteMainstage / track-headlining keynote slot
- 45-minute talkStandard conference session length
- 90-minute briefingHigh-density internal engineering all-hands
- Leadership sessionDirector / VP / staff-eng audience
- Panel or podcast guestDiscussion, debate, or guest interview
Talks built around operational judgment.
Each talk is grounded in real production patterns and tailored to the audience and runtime. Available as conference keynotes, internal engineering sessions, leadership offsites, or 90-minute briefings.
AI Does Not Replace SRE Judgment. It Raises the Cost of Bad Judgment.
How AI-assisted delivery changes blast radius, review practices, permissions, incident response, and operational trust — and why the engineers who succeed will be the ones who reason better, not faster.
Your Developer Toolchain Is Production Now
CI/CD, GitHub Actions, AI agents, package registries, secrets, and runners are no longer "just tooling." They're part of the production control plane — and they need to be governed like it.
DevOps Training Is Broken: We Teach Commands, Then Expect Judgment
Most DevOps training overvalues command recall and undervalues operational reasoning. What it would look like to train engineers for ambiguity, not for trivia — and why this matters more in an AI-assisted world.
Terraform at Scale Is an Operating Model Problem
Why Terraform messes are usually caused by ownership, state boundaries, review paths, and promotion models — long before they're caused by HCL.
Platform Engineering After the Kubernetes Gold Rush
Why the next phase of platform engineering is less about adding tools and more about adoption, governance, paved roads, support boundaries, and operational economics.
The New Control Plane Is Everything You Forgot to Govern
CI/CD, SaaS integrations, AI agents, secrets, runners, MCP-style tooling, and "helper" automation become production risk surfaces the moment they can change outcomes. A walkthrough of where the new control plane actually lives.
Who these talks are written for.
Practitioners
DevOps, SRE, platform engineers, and cloud engineers running real production systems.
Engineering Leadership
Directors, VPs, platform leads, and architects making infrastructure and team-shape decisions.
Conference & Community Audiences
SREcon, KubeCon, DevOpsDays, IaCConf, vendor & community events, and internal engineering all-hands.
Operator first. Speaker because of it.
Brian Teller
Brian is a Staff/Principal-level DevOps and platform engineer who has spent the last 25+ years running production infrastructure across startups, scaling SaaS companies, and large platform organizations. His background spans Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, CI/CD, Kafka, reliability engineering, and incident response — but his real specialty is the judgment that sits behind the tools.
He hosts Ship It Weekly, a DevOps, SRE, cloud, and platform engineering podcast for people running production systems, and publishes On Call Brief, a weekly briefing of operationally relevant industry change. The same operator-focused lens carries through to his talks: tradeoffs, failure modes, blast radius, ownership, and what changed for the people actually carrying the pager.
Hear how Brian thinks in real time.
The fastest way to get a feel for tone, content, and depth: Ship It Weekly. Every episode is Brian's voice and lens on infrastructure, AI-era operations, and the daily reality of running production systems.
Ship It Weekly — Brian's voice, episode after episode.
Live conversations on cloud, DevOps, platform engineering, AI in operations, and incident judgment. Recent guest appearances, conference talks, and panel discussions will be added here as they're confirmed.
View Ship It Weekly Episodes →Get a grounded operator voice in your room.
Conferences, internal engineering all-hands, leadership offsites, customer events, podcast interviews, or panels — let's talk about format, audience, and timing.