Starting fresh with a new team—whether it’s stepping into the net as a goalie or joining a company as a Site Reliability Engineer—comes with a rush of excitement, uncertainty, and the need to quickly adapt. In both worlds, you’re expected to understand the system, earn trust fast, and make the right decisions under pressure. This piece explores the parallels between guarding the crease in ice hockey and taking on infrastructure responsibilities in a new engineering org: the importance of communication, learning team dynamics, managing risk, and building confidence through early wins.

When you join a new hockey team as a goalie, you don’t just protect the net—you learn how the defensemen play, how aggressive the forwards are, and when the team tends to collapse or stretch the ice. Every team has its own rhythm and unspoken rules. The same is true when joining a new company as an SRE. The architecture is only part of the story; the real learning curve is understanding how incidents are handled, who actually makes the calls in a crunch, and which “informal” channels carry the most context. Just like a goalie can’t force their style on a team that plays differently, a new SRE needs to observe, adapt, and gradually find ways to complement and strengthen the existing flow. It’s less about proving you’re technically sound (that’s assumed) and more about showing that you can read the play and make the team better as a result.

In both hockey and SRE work, the moment things go sideways is when communication really counts. As a goalie, you see the whole ice—you’re the only one facing the play—and you need to call out shifts, loose players, or breakdowns in real time. If you hesitate, the puck’s in the net. As an SRE, it’s similar during an incident: you often have a high-level view of what’s happening across systems, and the ability to stay calm and clearly relay what you’re seeing can make the difference between a contained issue and a full-blown outage. But communication isn’t just about shouting the loudest—it’s about knowing when to speak, who needs to hear what, and doing it in a way that builds confidence rather than panic. Like a goalie steadying the team during a penalty kill, an SRE who brings calm clarity in high-stakes moments becomes an anchor for everyone else to rally around.

So, how do you build trust in a new team?⌗

Trust isn’t earned by pretending to be perfect—it’s built by showing up consistently, being accountable, and owning your impact, good or bad. As a goalie, you’re going to let in goals. Some are unstoppable, some are a result of defensive breakdowns, and some are just flat-out on you. What matters is how you handle it. Do you sulk? Blame? Or do you skate over, tap a teammate’s shin pads, and reset for the next faceoff? The same dynamic plays out in SRE. Early on, you’ll miss signals, ship a bad change, or overlook something you should have caught. Heck, there are days where you’ll break production. But by being transparent, acknowledging the miss, and showing what you’re doing to improve, you demonstrate humility and build credibility. Teams trust people who are honest about their fallibility and show a pattern of learning. Whether it’s a soft goal from the point or a mistuned alert that paged the team at 3 a.m., owning it builds more goodwill than perfection ever could. That openness also invites others to bring their guard down, leading to better collaboration and stronger long-term bonds.

As both a goalie and a leader, you quickly learn that most mistakes aren’t rooted in malice or incompetence—they’re byproducts of unclear systems, missing context, or just the fast pace of the game. When someone misses an assignment on the ice or forgets to update a runbook, it’s rarely because they don’t care—it’s usually because the process failed them. As an SRE leader, it’s your job to zoom out after the fact and ask not just who made the mistake, but why it made sense in that moment—and how the system can be improved so the next person has a better shot. Maybe the alert was noisy, the handoff lacked key context, or a dependency wasn’t clearly documented. Whatever it is, you shift the focus from blame to learning. Like a goalie giving quiet guidance during a timeout, your job is to reset the team without undercutting their confidence. Owning your own mistakes gives you the credibility to address others with empathy—and turning those moments into durable process improvements is how teams get stronger over time.

Whether you’re stepping onto the ice or into a new engineering org, the fundamentals are the same: learn the team, communicate clearly under pressure, take ownership, and lead with empathy. Both roles are high-trust, high-impact, and deeply human. You’re not just reacting—you’re anticipating, supporting, and constantly adjusting to help the people around you succeed. The best teams don’t expect perfection—they expect presence, accountability, and a shared commitment to get better together. In the end, it’s not about never letting a goal in or preventing every outage. It’s about being the kind of teammate who learns fast, shows up when it matters, and helps turn every setback into forward motion.