You likely view your engineering on-call rotation as an operational necessity—a tax you pay to keep the lights on. But if you are a Founder-CEO or PE Operating Partner, you need to reframe this immediately. A chaotic, high-stress on-call rotation is not just an HR headache; it is a compliance violation waiting to happen and a direct threat to your EBITDA.
We typically see this pattern in Series B and C companies: the ‘hero’ engineer who built the core platform is the only one who knows how to fix it at 2 AM. This works until it doesn't. When that engineer burns out and quits—which happens to 23-25% of engineers annually in high-stress environments—you don't just lose code. You lose your SOC 2 Incident Response capability (CC 7.3), you breach your Availability SLAs, and you risk a $300,000 per hour downtime penalty.
In 2025, the market has shifted. Engineers are no longer willing to tolerate ‘death marches.’ Data from Forbes indicates that 66% of American employees are experiencing burnout, an all-time high. If your incident response strategy relies on the goodwill of tired people rather than documented systems, you are effectively shorting your own stock.
For a scaling SaaS company, ‘Compliance & Security’ isn't just about passing an audit. It's about Operational Resilience. If your on-call team is sleep-deprived, their ability to triage a security breach degrades by over 40%. You aren't just risking uptime; you're risking a data breach because the responder was too tired to notice the anomaly. That is a board-level risk.
How do you know if your on-call is toxic? You measure the ‘Toil.’ In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) terms, toil is the repetitive, manual work that scales linearly with service growth. If your revenue doubles, does your on-call volume double? If yes, your margins are about to collapse.
Recent industry reports suggest that operational toil has risen to 30% of engineering time in 2025. This is the danger zone. When engineers spend a third of their time fighting fires, they stop building features. Your product roadmap stalls, but your payroll costs remain the same.
We use the On-Call Health Scorecard to diagnose portfolio companies. Ask these three questions:
The financial impact of ignoring this is severe. Replacing a senior engineer costs 100-150% of their annual salary in recruiting fees, ramp time, and lost velocity. A $150k engineer quitting due to bad on-call actually costs the business $300k+. Spending $20k to fix your alerting infrastructure has a 15x ROI.
Fixing on-call is an engineering problem, but it requires executive air cover. You cannot simply tell the team to ‘work smarter.’ You must mandate structural changes. Here is the 90-day turnaround plan for Stalled Founder-CEOs.
Force a review of every alert that triggered in the last 90 days. If an alert did not require a specific human action, delete it. If it required an action that can be scripted, automate it. You must ruthlessly cull the noise to save the signal. This immediately reduces alert fatigue and restores sanity.
Never put a junior engineer on-call alone. Implement a primary/secondary model (Shadow Rotation). The secondary (experienced) engineer backs up the primary. This serves two purposes: it ensures 100% availability for compliance audits, and it trains the next generation of responders, breaking the tribal knowledge monopoly.
If an engineer is woken up at 3 AM, they should not be at standup at 9 AM. Codify this policy. ‘Sustainable On-Call’ means acknowledging the physiological toll of interrupted sleep. Giving that engineer the next morning off isn't ‘lost productivity’—it's retention insurance.
In your next board meeting, present your Runbooks. If they don't exist, you are uninvestable. Every alert must link to a specific, step-by-step runbook. This transforms on-call from a ‘guessing game’ into a repeatable process that any competent engineer can execute. This is how you move from Founder-led heroics to Enterprise-grade scalability.
The Bottom Line: Your uptime is only as durable as your team's mental health. Build a system that allows your best people to sleep, and they will build a platform that allows you to scale.
