Braintrust by Cortex

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta talks with Aleks Rudzitis, Principal Engineer at AWS, about how the structure and theater of ops reviews can turn reliability into a shared organizational value. Aleks explains how error budgets make reliability standards concrete rather than aspirational, why async reports can't replace the psychological weight of a live meeting with leadership, and how AI h...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually s...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Engineering at Okta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the relationship between platform engineering, SRE, and security. Dinesh explains why platform teams must treat engineers as users and run real discovery before building. They get into how paved paths have evolved from code scaffolding to guardrailing AI-generated c...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain. Matt and Ganesh discuss why compliance can be mostly automated rather than a mandatory b...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization. Sneha and Ahmed explain why developer platforms need a product mindset alongside engineering, how renaming their t...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan explains how Rootly treats reliability as a product feature rather than just a technical metric, and why culture might be the most impactful element of building reliable systems. Dan and Ganesh discuss weekly operational reviews that tie technical metrics back to user experience, how load testing and...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box, who spent 15 years at the company growing from senior IC to leading its core platform organization, to talk about what engineering leadership looks like at each level of the org. Tamar walks through how the job fundamentally changes as you move from manager to director to VP, including a key shift at d...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI. Rob shares how the industry's move away from dedicated QA has cost teams more than they realize, and explains how AI is changing what good software quality actually looks like. Rob and Ganesh discuss why velocity without direction is the wrong thing to optimize for, how LLMs can help teams think like a great QA engin...

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Boyan Dimitrov, CTO at SIXT. Boyan shares how SIXT went from releasing software once or twice a month to nearly 10,000 deployments per month, and explains the platform engineering philosophy that made it possible. Boyan and Ganesh discuss why velocity and quality don't have to be a trade-off, how SIXT's standardization work paid off unexpectedl...

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Randy Shoup , SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market . Randy shares lessons from his leadership roles across multiple companies and explains how measurement and transparency can help teams build stronger engineering cultures. Randy and Ganesh chat about how fear can block progress, why recovery speed matters more tha...

Steve Evans, former SVP of Engineering at Chegg, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why the microservices revolution created a new class of hidden costs that most engineering organizations never see coming. Steve shares his firsthand experience watching a 300-person org slowly get dragged down by an expanding empire of micro-repos, and why the real damage shows up not in outages, but in the cognitive t...

Jeff Schnitter, Solution Architect at Cortex and former developer experience leader at Workday, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why changing engineering culture requires starting with pain points rather than jumping to solutions. Jeff shares his experience shifting from a standardization mindset to an outcomes-based approach, the critical lesson that software development is "more faith-based than te...

Fred Mare, a principal engineer at Xero, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why production readiness should be framed around the customer experience rather than internal operational concerns. Fred shares Xero's approach to confidence scores—a signal that aggregates quality metrics, change size, and test coverage to predict the impact of any deployment on end users. Fred and Ganesh discuss criticality t...

This week, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta discusses the evolution of platform engineering with Kaspar von Grünberg , CEO and co-founder of Humanitec . Kaspar draws a sharp contrast between the "artisanal" method of software development and the industrialized approach required for modern enterprises. He argues that relying on individual heroes to "YOLO" their way through deployments is unsu...

Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud, joins Ganesh Datta to explore how AI is reshaping software delivery—and why the fundamentals matter more than ever. Nathen shares insights from DORA's 2025 report on AI adoption, the surprising finding that AI acts as an amplifier of both good and bad practices, and the critical shift teams must make from chasing elite performance...

Tyler Davis, a software engineer at Canva, joins Ganesh Datta to explore how internal tools can be a source of joy and leverage for engineering teams. Tyler shares Canva's multi-year journey building their internal developer portal on Backstage, the moment they realized scorecards could transform operational excellence, and the eye-opening decision to switch to Cortex despite significant investmen...

In the first episode of the Cortex podcast, co-founders Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta pull back the curtain on the journey of building an internal developer portal from the ground up. They share the story of the early days, when the unproven market required moving at maximum velocity to find product-market fit and win critical first deals. The conversation explores the key moments that forced a fund...

How do you balance speed and quality when your customers are counting on you? What does it actually take to build a culture of reliability? And how should engineering leaders think about AI when it's changing everything about how we ship software? On Braintrust, Ganesh Datta, CTO and Co-founder of Cortex, sits down with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical leaders who've been in the trenches—th...