You will not be open to lawsuits or criminal prosecution because bugs are introduced by all devs all the time. It is part of the job. The judge and jury will as

You will not be open to lawsuits or criminal prosecution because bugs are introduced by all devs all the time. It is part of the job. The judge and jury will ask why only this person is being prosecuted - could it be because of retaliation? Realistically, most PIP focused managers are so deluded about engineering that they wouldn't be able to tell when an issue would occur in the future - could be as simple as DBs filling up with writes, or a high cardinality metric exploding the bill, or an expired cert. Clever motivated engineers are so skilled that they will find something. The real fix is for management to change their attitude and practices. Just do that.