Company overview
EarnIn is 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.
Key Wins:
97% service ownership: nearly all services now have clearly designated owners in the Cortex Catalog
Fully automated infrastructure workflows: developers no longer wait on infrastructure configurations for things like AWS secrets, Terraform workspaces, and Argo CD rollbacks
Proactive service health tracking replacing reactive, manual monitoring across SLOs, monitor coverage, and security posture
Successful migration from Backstage with no data loss, reducing ongoing maintenance burden
EarnIn initially adopted Backstage to bring order to their service catalog, supplementing it with custom plugins to support developer workflows. But the maintenance burden grew, adoption lagged, and the platform couldn't keep pace with the organization's needs.
More fundamentally, EarnIn's operational functions lacked a cohesive foundation. Reliability, ownership, infrastructure, and security data lived across dozens of tools. Leaders couldn't easily connect engineering health to business outcomes. Developers lost time navigating manual processes instead of building. The teams responsible for making engineering better (i.e. platform, SRE, DevEx) were executing in parallel rather than as a unified function.
EarnIn selected Cortex as the foundation for their Engineering Operations practice, replacing their homegrown Backstage setup. The decision was driven by a desire for immediate time-to-value, seamless migration tooling, and the features needed to run a continuous improvement operation: Scorecards, automated reporting, and initiatives that could drive org-wide standards at scale.
Over two years, Cortex became the connective tissue across EarnIn's engineering organization.
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.
Cortex's automated Scorecards replaced manual data collection, allowingenabling EarnIn's engineering leadership, including their CTO, to run biweekly Operational Excellence Reviews with real data. These reviews tracked SLO adoption and health, audited monitor coverage across new and legacy services, and reviewed infrastructure utilization and security posture.
This is Engineering Operations in practice: a regular operational cadence, backed by automated intelligence, connecting engineering health directly to business outcomes.
Increasing velocity through self-service
Manual steps within the SDLC became significant bottlenecks, slowing delivery and hindering efficiency.
Cortex enabled EarnIn to embed best practices directly into developer workflows through self-service automation. AWS secret management, Terraform workspace bootstrapping, Linkerd authorization, and Argo CD rollback tooling were all surfaced through custom plugins in Cortex.
“With custom plugins in Cortex, developers don’t need to wait for infrastructure configurations anymore. It’s fully automated.”
– Nick Raccioppi, Engineering Leader, EarnIn
Expanding EngOps beyond internal systems
EarnIn’s ecosystem includes not only internal services but also external vendors with diverse SLAs and contacts.
EarnIn used Cortex's flexible data model to bring vendor management under the same operational framework as internal services, capturing account executives, support contacts, Slack channels, ownership, and escalation policies in the Catalog.
External complexity, once managed separately and inconsistently, now operated within the same structure as everything else.
“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 didn't just implement a tool. They built an Engineering Operations practice: the organizational capacity to identify problems, drive standards, reduce friction, and improve continuously, week over week.
The results speak for themselves: proactive service health tracking, early issue detection, dramatically reduced MTTR, and a culture where engineering excellence is foundational.
