The schedule that decides which engineer is responsible for incidents at any given moment, the operational backbone of every SRE team.
An on-call rotation is the schedule that determines which engineer (or engineers, in primary/secondary tiers) is responsible for responding to incidents at a given time. A healthy rotation has follow-the-sun coverage so no one is paged at 3am every shift, primary and secondary tiers so a missed page escalates, paid compensation reflecting the real burden, and a documented handoff at every shift change so the incoming engineer inherits open context.
On-call burden is the single biggest driver of SRE attrition. A poorly-designed rotation, no follow-the-sun, no comp, vague escalation, drives senior engineers out within 18 months. A well-designed rotation, paired with low alert noise, retains them.
See the part of the platform that handles on-call rotation in production.