Pete Hamilton

Pete Hamilton is co-founder and chief technology officer of incident.io, a London, England, company whose software helps engineering teams respond to outages, manage on-call rotations and follow up afterward, much of it from Slack. He started it with Stephen Whitworth and Chris Evans, whom he met as engineers at Monzo, the British digital bank.

Looking for an Incident Tool at GoCardless

Hamilton began his career at GoCardless, the London payments company, and has worked in engineering at startups and scale-ups for about a decade. At GoCardless he went looking for an incident management tool to buy and found none he liked, he recalled on incident.io's founder podcast. He reached out to Evans on Twitter, who had built his own tool, and was surprised to get a reply. "I think I had like a hundred Twitter followers," he said. He left for Monzo before he could set anything up at GoCardless, and found Evans's tool already installed there.

Early Mornings With Two Monzo Colleagues

During the pandemic, Hamilton and Whitworth were working through a list of possible side projects and kept coming back to incidents. Before building anything, they checked with Evans, whose open-source tool had come out of Monzo, and the three agreed to a one-month trial of early-morning and late-evening sessions. Hamilton remembered waking at about 5:30 in the morning for three-hour calls in the dark, then switching to his day job when it got light. Their first big demo was for GoCardless, his former employer, and Hamilton led it.

Leading Engineering at incident.io

As CTO he spends most of his time on engineering and product, and he has also covered operations, legal and finance. On the Scaling DevTools podcast in 2025, he and Evans explained why the company started on Heroku and kept its early infrastructure simple while it looked for paying customers. They also described why incident.io keeps a person in the loop for its AI features: a responder still reviews AI-drafted updates before they go out, which keeps the time saved while limiting the risk of a confident but wrong message.