Introduction
EarnIn, a financial technology company that allows users to access earned wages as they work and regards operational excellence as critical to its success. With thousands of users and a fast-growing engineering team, the company needed a scalable solution to maintain high reliability and accelerate delivery—without overwhelming its developers.
Initially, EarnIn adopted Backstage, an open source service catalog platform, and wrote custom plugins to support developer workflows. However, challenges with adoption and maintenance costs hindered its long-term success. They saw that the Internal Developer Portal (IDP) space was rapidly growing and in their desire to streamline and simplify the self-service processes they selected Cortex as it provided several advantages over their homegrown platform:
Rapid time-to-value via out-of-the-box integrations.
The Backstage Migration Helper to enable seamless transition without data loss.
Easier setup and ongoing maintenance compared to Backstage.
Robust features like Scorecards, reporting, and initiatives to promote continual improvement and best-practice alignment.
Now, over two years later, Cortex has become central to EarnIn’s operational framework.
1. Improving reliability through Operational Excellence
In early 2025 EarnIn began its journey to improve reliability through better operational excellence, which it defined as a culture and process change, not just technical improvements. EarnIn’s definition of Operational Excellence is measuring reliability through SLOs, reviewing them and other operational metrics and prioritizing the work needed to maintain high levels of reliability. To do this, EarnIn introduced biweekly Operational Excellence Reviews, involving engineering leadership up to the CTO. These reviews focused on:
Tracking adoption and health of SLOs.
Auditing monitor coverage across new and legacy services.
Reviewing infrastructure utilization and security posture.
Cortex’s automated Scorecards replaced manual data collection from various platforms, enabling:
Proactive tracking of service health.
Early issue detection.
Continuous improvement and customer reliability.
2. Increasing velocity through self-service
Manual steps within the SDLC became significant bottlenecks, slowing delivery and hindering efficiency. Cortex improved speed and autonomy by enabling self-service features:
Custom Plugins: Including AWS secret-management automation, Terraform workspace bootstrapping, Linkerd authorization, and Argo CD rollback tooling to accelerate delivery and reduce MTTR.
Defined Ownership: 97% of services now have clearly designated owners in the Cortex Catalog, enhancing accountability.
“With custom plugins in Cortex, developers don’t need to wait for infrastructure configurations anymore. It’s fully automated.” – Nick Raccioppi, Engineering Leader, EarnIn
3. Expanding the boundaries: managing vendor complexity
EarnIn’s ecosystem includes not only internal services but also external vendors with diverse SLAs and contacts.
To manage this, EarnIn used Cortex’s flexible data model to create custom entity types in the Catalog for vendors, capturing:
Account executives.
Support contacts.
Slack channels.
Ownership and escalation policies.
This brought vendor management under the same governance structure as internal systems, ensuring seamless collaboration and operational continuity. “Our customers push Cortex to new heights. Our flexible data model lets you bring ownership, accountability, and governance to anything in your engineering org.” – Ganesh Datta, CTO, Cortex
The takeaway
EarnIn had already laid the groundwork for reliability, but Cortex helped us take it to the next level bringing greater visibility, consistency, and operational foresight to how we manage our services at scale. By streamlining visibility, enabling automation, and unifying governance across both internal and external systems, EarnIn has cultivated a culture where engineering excellence and innovation can thrive.
