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On-call rotation design, escalation tiers, runbook standards and burnout prevention
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Based on SOC occupation classification
| name | on-call-design |
| description | On-call rotation design, escalation tiers, runbook standards and burnout prevention |
| category | operational |
| preferred-model | sonnet |
| min-confidence | 0.8 |
| depends-on | ["observability","incident-postmortem"] |
| estimated-tokens | 4000 |
| triggers | {} |
| tags | ["on-call","escalation","runbook","pagerduty"] |
Tier 1 (First Responder):
Who: Engineer on rotation (weekly cycle)
SLA: Acknowledge in 5 min, respond in 15 min
Scope: All production alerts for their service(s)
Tier 2 (Specialist):
Who: Senior engineer / tech lead
SLA: Respond in 30 min
Scope: Escalated issues, cross-service problems
Tier 3 (Leadership):
Who: Engineering manager / CTO
SLA: Respond in 1 hour
Scope: Major incidents, customer-facing outages, data breaches
| Pattern | Team Size | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly rotation | 4+ engineers | Simple, predictable | Long shifts |
| Follow-the-sun | 8+ (multi-TZ) | No night pages | Coordination overhead |
| Primary/Secondary | 6+ | Backup coverage | Requires 2 people always |
| Business hours only | 3+ | No night pages | Gaps in coverage |
| Hybrid | 5+ | Balanced | Complex scheduling |
Week 1: Alice (primary), Bob (secondary)
Week 2: Bob (primary), Carol (secondary)
Week 3: Carol (primary), Dave (secondary)
Week 4: Dave (primary), Alice (secondary)
Rules:
- Primary: first responder, expected to resolve or escalate
- Secondary: backup if primary doesn't acknowledge in 10 min
- Handoff: Monday 10am (overlap with both people)
- Minimum 4 weeks between primary shifts
- Never on-call during PTO
# PagerDuty/OpsGenie-style escalation
escalation_policy:
name: "Backend API"
repeat_count: 2 # Retry full chain 2x before giving up
steps:
- timeout_minutes: 5
targets:
- type: on_call_primary
- timeout_minutes: 10
targets:
- type: on_call_secondary
- timeout_minutes: 15
targets:
- type: team_lead
- notification: slack_channel_critical
- timeout_minutes: 30
targets:
- type: engineering_manager
- notification: phone_call
Every service MUST have:
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**Backend Code Review (Node.js, Java, Microservices)**: Expert review of backend code focusing on Node.js, Java, Clean Architecture, SOLID principles, microservices patterns, SQL/database design, messaging (Kafka, SQS, SNS), and payment flows. Use whenever the user wants a review of backend code, API design, service architecture, database queries, or mentions Node, Java, Spring, NestJS, Express, microservices, REST API, gRPC, or asks to review server-side code. Also trigger for database schema reviews, query optimization, and message queue patterns.