Goalkeeping Principles

Goalkeeping is a rotating operational responsibility carried out by all engineers. Each engineer takes ownership of goalkeeping duties for one week during a delivery cycle.

The purpose of goalkeeping is to maintain the health, security and reliability of the platform while allowing the rest of the team to focus on planned delivery work.

Goalkeeping is not a dedicated support role. It is a shared engineering responsibility that ensures operational work is managed effectively while knowledge is spread across the team.

Responsibilities

During a goalkeeping week, the engineer is responsible for:

Support & Operations

Monitoring and responding to customer and internal support requests.
Acting as the first point of contact for technical issues raised in Slack.
Investigating and coordinating operational issues through to resolution.
Escalating significant incidents where required.

Defect Resolution

Fixing bugs discovered by customers or internal teams.
Prioritising work based on impact and severity.
Addressing recurring issues that create operational overhead.

Security & Maintenance

Reviewing and applying Dependabot updates.
Resolving identified security vulnerabilities.
Keeping dependencies up to date where risk and effort are proportionate.
Ensuring security-related actions are prioritised appropriately.

Platform Health

Monitoring system health and operational alerts.
Investigating unusual behaviour or performance degradation.
Making small improvements that improve platform stability and reliability.

Paper Cuts

Fixing small usability issues, developer frustrations and quality-of-life improvements.
Addressing minor defects that are unlikely to be prioritised during normal delivery work.
Reducing friction for customers, users and engineers.

Ownership vs Implementation

The goalkeeping engineer owns the outcome of support requests, incidents and operational work, but does not need to personally implement every fix.

Where specialist knowledge is required, the goalkeeping engineer should involve the appropriate subject matter expert and coordinate the work to resolution.

The goalkeeping engineer should remain actively involved in the investigation and resolution process. Wherever practical, issues should be resolved collaboratively rather than simply handed off to another engineer.

The objective is not only to resolve issues, but to increase shared understanding of the platform and reduce dependency on individual engineers over time.

Knowledge Transfer

Goalkeeping should help reduce knowledge silos across the engineering team.

When an issue requires specialist knowledge, the goalkeeping engineer should work with the relevant subject matter expert to understand the problem and capture the solution.

Where practical, fixes should be implemented collaboratively rather than simply handed over to the expert. The objective is to increase shared understanding of the platform and reduce dependency on individual engineers over time.

The goalkeeping engineer is responsible for ensuring any new knowledge, troubleshooting steps or operational procedures are documented in the knowledge base.

If an issue uncovers missing documentation, unclear processes or undocumented operational knowledge, updating the relevant documentation should form part of resolving the issue.

Prioritisation

Goalkeeping work should be prioritised in the following order:

P1 incidents and service-impacting issues.
P2 issues and customer-facing defects.
Support requests and operational activities.
Security vulnerabilities and dependency updates.
Paper cuts and small improvements.
Technical debt and maintenance activities.

Technical debt should only be tackled when higher-priority work is under control. The primary objective of goalkeeping is to keep the platform stable, secure and responsive to customer needs.

P1 Incidents

For P1 incidents, restoring service takes priority over knowledge transfer.

In these situations, the engineer best placed to resolve the issue should do so immediately, regardless of who is currently goalkeeping.

The goalkeeping engineer remains responsible for coordinating the response, ensuring communication takes place and capturing any lessons learned.

Documentation, knowledge transfer and process improvements should be completed once the incident has been resolved.

Success Criteria

A successful goalkeeping week means:

Customer issues are responded to promptly.
Critical bugs are resolved quickly.
Security vulnerabilities are actively managed.
The platform remains stable and reliable.
Small but valuable improvements are delivered.
Knowledge is shared across the team.
Relevant documentation is kept up to date.
The wider engineering team can focus on planned delivery work with minimal interruption.

Every goalkeeping rotation should leave the platform, documentation and team knowledge in a better state than before.