Robert Ross

Robert Ross is founder and CEO of FireHydrant, the incident management company he started as a side project while working as an on-call engineer.

Payroll Outages at Namely

Ross was an on-call engineer at DigitalOcean and then a site reliability engineer at Namely, a payroll and benefits company that handled "well over a billion dollars a month in payroll," he told SREpath. At Namely, he said on Changelog & Friends, there was a day when the payroll software "didn't pay an entire company."

Recording a FireHydrant Video Series

He set out to record a video series on how he would build an application from scratch, and the application he chose was an incident response tool he could use in his own job, he told Founders Talk. "Sometimes I was accidentally an arsonist," he said of his on-call years. An investor found the project and urged him to build a company around it.