Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Las Vegas 2024

How do you transform your flagship subscription service when you’ve got 34 million subscribers, and you need to build a next-gen streaming platform from the ground up? How do you drive a culture of engineering excellence when you’ve got less than 12 months until your Wall Street deadline?

SiriusXM is the leading audio entertainment company in North America. We’re a $9 billion business, with 150 million listeners enjoying curated music channels, on-demand talk shows, and live sports play-by-play. We wanted to do more for our subscriber base, and in 2022 we decided to move SiriusXM from satellite radio to an online streaming platform, by the end of 2023.

In 12 months, we ramped up an entirely new engineering organization, distributed across North America and Europe. Our 40 platform services teams built from scratch a cloud technology architecture that’s event-driven, multi-region, and super slick. At the same time, our ecosystem reliability teams leveled up our culture with observability as code, monthly chaos testing, and engineering scorecards. And in November 2023, we successfully launched our next-gen app, on Android, iPhone, Alexa, and more.

We’re Ben and Rachel, the VP of Services Engineering and the VP of Ecosystem Reliability at SiriusXM. We’d like to share with the ETLS community how we approached leadership at scale, our successes, and our lessons learned. You’ll take away from this session the scaling antipatterns we avoided, how we gave our teams technical alignment with maximum autonomy, and how we built reliability into our platform services through cross-team collaboration.