Braintrust dives into the operational realities of running high-performing engineering organizations, from production readiness and migrations to AI adoption and operational excellence.
Hosted by
Ganesh Datta
CTO & Co-founder at Cortex
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud. They dig into what really drives engineering excellence in the age of AI, why software delivery fundamentals matter more than ever, and why the best teams focus on improvement rather than benchmarks.
Ganesh and Nathen also discuss DORA's latest research into AI adoption, which found that AI acts as an amplifier, accelerates organizations with strong practices, and exposes dysfunction in those without. Nathen shares a few hard-won lessons from value stream mapping exercises that uncover invisible waste, explains why 30% distrust in AI might actually be healthy, and makes a compelling case for using this moment to finally drive the cultural changes teams have always wanted. Ganesh and Nathen also wrestle with the thorny question of what to actually measure when adopting AI tools and why lines of code is the wrong answer.
Nathen Harvey
DORA Lead & Developer Advocate
"We want to help you get better at getting better. This is all about a journey of continuous learning and continuous improvement."
Braintrust is designed for engineering leaders who want to understand how their engineering teams are operating, where the bottlenecks are, and the impact of AI
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Why DevOps Transformations Fail in Regulated Industries, with Merge Ready's Matt Bailey
Matt Bailey is a DevOps consultant and the founder of Merge Ready, a DevOps community and YouTube channel. He spends most of his time working with large regulated organizations across finance, healthcare, and government, helping them untangle the tooling decisions and processes that stall their software delivery.
In this episode of Braintrust, Matt and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta dig into why buying a new CI/CD platform doesn't count as a DevOps transformation, what "decision latency" costs regulated organizations, and how to automate compliance.
May 21, 2026
Matt Bailey
Founder & Executive Producer at Merge Ready
Building a developer platform like a product: Inside The New York Times with Sneha Rao and Ahmed Bebars
At The New York Times, roughly 1,000 engineers build everything in the NYT ecosystem from breaking news notifications to games to the cooking app. A single team, ‘Developer Platforms,’ owns the infrastructure they all ship on, from CI/CD and runtime to SRE and FinOps. Sneha Rao leads the group as its VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars is a principal engineer who works closely with Sneha.
In this episode of Braintrust, both Sneha and Ahmed, join Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to dig into what it actually means to run a developer platform with a product mindset. They discuss how the team's rename from Delivery Engineering reshaped which conversations they were part of, and why centralizing both reliability and cost functions inside the Platform org leads to better decisions than keeping them separate.
May 7, 2026
Sneha Rao & Ahmed Bebars
VP of Product Management & Principal Engineer at The New York Times
Rootly's Dan Sadler on why AI coding tools are driving more incidents and why reliability is the product
In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan shares how building a business-critical product forced Rootly to prioritize operational maturity far earlier than most companies would, and why that discipline is now paying off as AI coding tools push incident volumes higher across the industry.
They also discuss what a genuine reliability culture looks like in practice, the specific cadences Rootly uses to stay ahead of production issues, and why Dan believes the rising pace of AI-generated code makes the infrastructure around code more important than ever.
April 23, 2026
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
From IC to VP: Engineering Leadership at Every Level, with Box's Tamar Bercovici
When Tamar Bercovici joined Box, the engineering team consisted of just 30 people. In the 15 years since, she's worked through every level of the leadership track in the organization and is currently the VP of Engineering. She leads the core platform, which is the backend layer that storage, search, metadata, and Box's AI capabilities all run on.
In this episode of Braintrust, Tamar and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta get into what the job actually requires at each level from IC to VP, why the transition to a director-level role catches people off guard in a way the manager transition doesn't, and how platform teams make the case for their value when nothing they build has a user-facing feature attached to it.
April 9, 2026
Tamar Bercovici
VP of Engineering at Box
