Braintrust by Cortex

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 code, controlling token usage, and approving models. Dinesh also makes the case for meeting AI-generated threats with AI defenses, and explains how he sees platform, SRE, and security converging into a shared safety function at organizations shipping at AI speed.

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 bottleneck, how to turn 30-day approval processes into continuous audit readiness through controls as code, and why treating platform teams as product teams drives natural adoption. They also explore decision latency as a core organizational problem, the importance of stakeholder management as a DevOps skill, and how AI agents may shift infrastructure drift management from prevention to embrace.

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 team from Delivery Engineering opened a broader strategic mandate, and why SRE and reliability belong inside the platform rather than a separate function. They also share how to think about build vs. buy, when to start a platform function, and why AI is another evolution in the platform story rather than a revolution.

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 chaos engineering help Series A companies mature faster, and why dogfooding their own on-call product creates better engineering decisions. They also explore a concerning trend in Rootly's customer data showing that AI coding assistants are driving more incidents, and why reliability practices become even more critical as code generation speeds up.

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 director level where you stop working within constraints and start reshaping them. She and Ganesh dig into how AI is less a new challenge than a pressure test on existing engineering practices, and why teams with strong CI/CD and observability will move faster while undisciplined teams will struggle. Tamar also shares a mentorship pairing program where engineers already effective with AI coach those still learning, sometimes reversing the usual seniority dynamic. And she explains how Box's platform team connects internal standardization directly to external customer value through security, access control, and product cohesion.

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 engineer again, and what it takes to run exploration and core systems teams at fundamentally different speeds. They also get into why traditional delivery metrics fall short for innovation work, and what to measure instead when teams are discovering rather than just executing.

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 unexpectedly when AI arrived, and what it looks like to build a platform that earns its own adoption. They also get into how to measure platform value with cycle time and product ROI, and what starting from scratch would look like in an AI-first world.https://www.cortex.io/podcast

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 than trying to prevent every failure, and how teams improve through steady, incremental gains. They also discuss a few practical ways to build trust around metrics so organizations can use visibility for learning instead of punishment.

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 tax on developers every single day.Steve and Ganesh discuss why traditional engineering metrics like cycle time and deploy frequency can paint a dangerously misleading picture, how business context breaks down as it cascades through an org, and why round tables—not all-hands meetings—are the best way to diagnose where context stops flowing.

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 tech-based," and why new employees are uniquely valuable for questioning the status quo.

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 tiering based on customer jobs to be done, why automation is essential to avoid overloading engineering teams, the inseparable relationship between security and production readiness, and why the best advice for starting a production readiness program is to start small and treat it as a journey.

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 unsustainable, and that true scale demands standardized, reliable systems.Ganesh and Kaspar unpack why standardization doesn't kill creativity, the critical difference between "rigid paths" and "Golden Paths," and why treating your platform as a product is non-negotiable. They also discuss the emerging role of AI, arguing that AI agents are effectively a new class of "junior engineer" that makes robust platforms more essential than ever.

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 to driving elite improvement.Nathen and Ganesh discuss value stream mapping as a planning tool for 2026, why SLOs are becoming more important in an AI-first world, the trust paradox in AI adoption, how to use AI as a catalyst for cultural change, and why measuring lines of code generated by AI misses the point entirely. They also explore how foundational practices like working in small batches, strong version control, and user-centric focus become even more valuable when AI is writing more of your code.

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 investment in their homegrown solution.Tyler and Ganesh discuss their thinking around build vs. buy, how to measure the value of internal tools beyond traditional ROI, the psychology of sunk costs, and more.

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 fundamental mindset shift from prioritizing speed to engineering for enterprise-grade reliability and scale. Anish and Ganesh discuss the cultural and architectural decisions that defined this transition and offer a playbook for engineering leaders navigating today's AI-driven landscape, where the pressure to move fast is greater than ever.

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—the ones who've made the hard calls, shipped through the chaos, and built teams that actually work.They talk about the real stuff: the architectural decisions that come back to haunt you, the cultural rituals that keep teams aligned, and the practices that separate high-performing teams from everyone else.Whether you're leading a team of ten or a thousand, if you're trying to ship faster without breaking things, this podcast is for you.