Design On-Call Rotation

Create a sustainable on-call schedule that balances coverage with engineer well-being.

When to Use

• Setting up on-call for the first time
• Scaling team from 2-3 to 5+ engineers
• Addressing on-call burnout or alert fatigue
• Improving incident response times
• After post-mortem identifies handoff issues

Inputs

• Required: Team size and time zones
• Required: Service SLA requirements (response time, coverage hours)
• Optional: Historical incident volume and timing
• Optional: Budget for on-call compensation
• Optional: Existing on-call tool (PagerDuty, Opsgenie)