Picture this: Your newest hire aced the algorithm interview. Inverted a binary tree. Optimized a sliding window. Talked confidently about system design.
Three weeks into the job, the pager goes off at 2am. Database connections are spiking. Latency is through the roof. Customers are churning.
Your new engineer freezes.
They know how to reverse a linked list, but they have never traced a request through a distributed system. They can whiteboard a load balancer, but they have never watched one buckle under real traffic. They memorized Big O notation, but they have never seen a memory leak slowly strangle a production service.
This is the gap we built Incident Drill to close.
The Disconnect Is Everywhere
It is not just hiring. The same pattern repeats across the industry.
SRE onboarding takes months because new hires have to wait for real incidents to learn. You cannot manufacture a cascading failure for training purposes. So junior SREs shadow seniors, read runbooks, and hope they absorb enough before their first on-call shift.
Backend engineers own production but fear it. “You build it, you run it” sounds great until a developer who has never debugged anything outside their IDE gets paged for their service. They know their code, but production is a different beast. Every incident becomes an escalation to an already-stretched SRE team.
Game days are essential but dangerous. Everyone knows teams should practice incident response. But chaos engineering in production is risky. One wrong configuration, one scenario that spirals, and you have created real customer impact. So teams run fewer drills than they should, or skip them entirely.
The common thread: We have no safe place to practice the skills that matter most.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
Bad hires who interviewed well but cannot debug under pressure. Months of ramping time before anyone trusts a new SRE on-call alone. Backend engineers who escalate every issue because they do not know what else to do. Senior SREs burning out from carrying the pager load while juniors slowly learn.
And when incidents do happen, teams that have not practiced together respond slower. Communication breaks down. Runbooks are untested. MTTR creeps up. Customers notice.
The irony is painful: We spend enormous effort hiring for “production readiness” using interviews that test anything but production readiness.
A Different Approach
Incident Drill drops engineers into realistic, broken production environments. On demand. No infrastructure to set up. No production systems at risk.
When we say realistic, we mean it. These are not toy problems or multiple-choice quizzes. Engineers use actual observability tools: distributed tracing with waterfall visualizations, real-time metrics dashboards, log aggregation. The same tools they would use in a real incident.
The scenarios are built from patterns we have seen break production systems across the industry: database connection pool exhaustion, cascading service failures, memory leaks, network partitions, runaway queries. Problems that test debugging instincts, not textbook knowledge.
And because every session is recorded, you can replay investigations command-by-command. Share them with hiring committees. Use them for team learning. No more “you had to be there” debriefs.
Who This Is For
Hiring managers who are tired of engineers who ace whiteboards but freeze on-call. Watch candidates debug real problems. See what tools they reach for. Understand how they think under pressure.
SRE teams who need to onboard new hires faster without waiting for real incidents. Give junior SREs hands-on experience with infrastructure failures before their first pager rotation.
Backend engineering teams adopting production ownership. Prepare developers to handle their own service issues confidently, reducing escalations and building a sustainable on-call culture.
Platform teams who want to run game days without production risk. Test runbooks, practice incident commander rotations, and identify gaps in your response playbooks.
Join the Waitlist
We are opening Incident Drill to founding clients. Early access means you help shape the roadmap. You get direct support from our team. And you lock in significant discounts before general availability.
If you have ever watched a hire freeze during their first incident, or wondered how to get new SREs on-call faster, or wished you could run weekly drills without the production risk, we built this for you.
Binary trees do not fix outages. Muscle memory does.