Rajasekaran Selvarajan

JD Sports, a global retail leader with thousands of physical stores and rapidly growing digital channels, has undergone a major shift within technology towards composable commerce. This transformation has placed increasing pressure on technology teams to innovate faster, deliver seamless customer experiences, and support a continuously expanding portfolio of services — often with limited resources.

In this session, Rajasekaran Selvarajan (JD Sports) and Oscar Bransbury-Beare (Capacitas) share how the SRE function became a catalyst for scalability, stability, and speed within JD Sports’ evolving technology landscape. The talk explores how resilient SRE practices and mature observability have enabled JD Sports to deliver continuous change while maintaining operational excellence.

Key topics include:

• Automating frameworks to enable early and frequent testing, shifting reliability practices left, and unlocking SRE to work on new processes alongside engineering.
• Centralising risk, incident, and problem management through SRE principles to bridge the gap between service management and engineering disciplines.
• Build Observability-as-a-Service, underpinned by service catalogues, SLOs, and NFRs — simplifying onboarding for new services.
• Embedding observability from day one to eliminate implementation blockers and ensure fit-for-purpose monitoring and alerting.
• Establishing a central Centre of Excellence to unify processes, tooling, and principles — driving efficiency, consistency, and cost savings.