Saw the term “AiRE” today — AI Reliability Engineer. Who coined this?
Turns out it traces back to Denys Vasyliev, with Liz Fong-Jones crediting Todd Underwood as “the original AiRE.”
The comments revealed the tension: Phil Calcado questioned whether this truly differs from existing distributed systems engineering practices. Oliver Leaver-Smith joked about having ChatGPT and Perplexity as a warm spare. The skepticism is fair — but the naming matters because it signals a shift in what reliability means when AI is in the loop.
Is it a new role or just SRE with a new hat? Probably both. The reliability challenges of AI systems are genuinely different — non-deterministic outputs, model drift, hallucination management — even if the underlying engineering discipline is familiar.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.