Company overview
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform serving B2C and B2B brands in more than 150 countries. Since its founding in 2009, the company has maintained a customer-first mindset and a culture where every employee is encouraged to innovate.
In e-commerce, downtime isn't just an inconvenience - it's lost revenue for merchants and their customers. Keeping software always-ready requires more than great engineers. It requires an operational discipline that can scale: clear ownership, consistent standards, and the ability to continuously improve across a distributed engineering organization.
BigCommerce chose to hone their Engineering Operations discipline with Cortex.
Key wins:
Always-accurate service ownership: Eliminated the "who owns this?" problem that slowed every incident and planning conversation.
Faster incident response: With ownership and dependencies always current, the right people are identified and looped in immediately when something goes wrong.
Automated standards enforcement: Replaced manual audits and broadcast messages with continuous, targeted accountability.
Shared definition of readiness: Scorecards gave 250+ engineers a measurable, consistent bar for production readiness
The challenge
At BigCommerce, innovation has always been part of the culture. The engineering team operates without a top-down technical decision-making structure, giving teams autonomy to move quickly. But with that autonomy comes the need for consistent standards to keep software production-ready. As the organization grew past 250 engineers, the lack of a shared operational model started creating real friction.
Principal Engineer Shaun McCormick had been holding things together with spreadsheets. He was manually tracking standards across observability, security, and quality, which worked when the team was small, but didn't scale.
Answering basic operational questions like, “Is this service production-ready? Who owns it? What does it depend on?” required combing through multiple tools, pinging colleagues, and piecing together context that should have been instantly available.
Without a single operational view, decision-making slowed, incident response lagged, and the engineering organization had no shared language for what "good" looked like.
"You can't hope a service is performing well. You have to measure it with consistent, automated checks. The only way to do that at scale is to remove manual work and standardize the process," Shaun says.
The solution: Engineering operations as a system
BigCommerce didn't just need better tooling. They needed to run their engineering organization with accurate data, clear ownership, defined standards, and a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement. In short, they needed an Engineering Operations discipline.
Cortex became the platform that made that possible.
Centralized Visibility: A Single Source of Truth
Cortex automatically mapped ownership, dependencies, and on-call contacts across BigCommerce's entire engineering stack, integrating with the tools teams were already using.
This resulted in a live, always-accurate catalog of every service.
"With Cortex, we know exactly who owns what, how it's performing, and what it's connected to. That alone has saved us countless hours every week," Shaun says.
The engineering organization finally had the visibility needed to make fast, confident decisions.
Automated Standards: Enforcing What Good Looks Like
BigCommerce needed a way to define shared standards and ensure the entire engineering org moved toward them continuously. Cortex Scorecards gave them that mechanism.
"You could be an executive making a request in Slack, but 90% of people won't see it before it scrolls away. Cortex ensures the right person gets the right information at the right time," Shaun says.
Instead of relying on broadcast messages or email reminders, Scorecards continuously monitor every service against defined standards and route targeted, actionable notifications to the right owners.
This is Engineering Operations in practice: embedding standards into the workflow rather than relying on tribal knowledge, manual audits, or good intentions.
A Look at BigCommerce's Scorecards
BigCommerce uses two types of Scorecards to drive operational maturity across the organization:
Domain Scorecards focus on customer-impact areas: quality, security, and incident management, with a priority on fast resolution times. They also track post-incident follow-ups to ensure problems don't recur.
"Our customers know no system is perfect. What keeps them with us is knowing that if something happens, we fix it fast. Scorecards help us make that promise real," Shaun says.
Service Scorecards track operational maturity, observability, and performance at the service level. They surface inefficiencies, enforce standards, and reduce the onboarding friction when engineers move between teams.
"Service-level scorecards help us answer what's slowing us down and where we can be more efficient," Shaun says.
BigCommerce’s approach is customer-centric: if an issue affects merchants’ ability to transact or communicate with their customers, it becomes a priority in the scorecards. Engineering standards aren't abstract, they're tied directly to business outcomes.
The result: A сontinuously improving Engineering Organization
By building an Engineering Operations practice with Cortex, BigCommerce transformed how its engineering organization runs, not just what it builds.
The organization describes itself as having moved from reactive and manual to proactive and continuous.
"Cortex lets us focus on building and improving rather than chasing down information. It keeps us ready for customers every single day," Shaun says.
For BigCommerce, "always ready" is a promise to merchants worldwide. Engineering Operations - powered by Cortex - is how they keep this promise.
To learn how Cortex can help your organization build an Engineering Operations practice, visit our website or book a live demo today.
