Steve Flanders is a Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk, now part of Cisco, where he oversees the Splunk Observability Cloud platform. He has spent nearly two decades in observability and was a founding member of OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry, helping build the service that became the OpenTelemetry Collector. He wrote the book on it, literally: Mastering OpenTelemetry and Observability. He's now also leading AI transformation for his business unit, which he digs into during the episode.

Steve joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to trace where the real constraints in software delivery are moving now that AI writes more of the code. They get into why review and rework break first, why "garbage in, garbage out" now governs observability, and how to instrument for a world where an agent, not a human, is querying your telemetry. Steve closes with his advice for teams under pressure to just ship: fix one thing at a time.

Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso, working on Kratix, the open-source framework for building platforms, and its enterprise version, Syntasso Kratix Enterprise. Outside Syntasso she stays close to the community side of the field: she's a CNCF ambassador, a former lead of the CNCF platforms working group, a co-chair of recent KubeCons in Europe and North America, and a Team Topologies advocate.

Abby joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to discuss what a platform actually is: the layer that encodes your business onto your infrastructure, exposed through an API that lets the team behind it change how things work without forcing every other team to change with them. They cover why skills are "markdowns that say pretty please," the producer-versus-consumer marketplace model for platform engineering, and why template-driven infrastructure is the "puppy for Christmas" anti-pattern.

Martin Nettling, Ph.D., is a Senior Director of Engineering at Tealium, where he also runs QA. He came up through bioinformatics and molecular genetics before moving into computer science and software development. Martin was VP of Engineering at Datameer before joining Tealium two years ago. He brought six or seven engineers with him, which meant grafting an established team and its own way of working onto a worldwide company with teams in Poland and the US. That experience of building trust across cultures runs straight into the topic of this episode.

Martin joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to separate two ideas most teams lump together. Confidence is for tools, trust is for people, and treating an AI-generated PR as a referendum on the engineer who wrote it gets both wrong. They get into the "augmented author model" (whoever uses AI owns how its output is communicated), the "unbroken why" that lets you trace a log line back to company strategy, why throwing every kind of code into one review bucket is a mistake, and how risk labels bubbling up into a traffic-light system let teams stop reviewing everything. Martin closes on the part of the system he trusts least, and it isn't the model. Read more from Dr. Nettling on trust and confidence here.

Aleks Rudzitis joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to make the case that the operational review is a human backstop that matters more as AI accelerates how fast teams ship. They discuss why a standing meeting holds where an asynchronous report tends to atrophy, why the review's authority comes from who's in the room rather than the meeting itself, and how the principle Aleks calls "human-driven infrastructure" persists through the shift to agents. Aleks closes on the concept of ‘creating space’: a good ops review exists to begin the right conversation rather than to review graphs for their own sake. He writes about reliability on his blog, Bits and Being. The opinions expressed in this podcast are his own.

Read more from him on operational reviews here and on preventing incidents here.

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex. Shawn has led operational excellence efforts at Microsoft, Uber, and SoFi, and brings a practitioner's playbook for how to actually run these weekly reviews, from automating red/green reports, including senior leadership, and engaging in relentless follow-through on action items.

They dig into the mechanics that make operational excellence reviews successful and the reasons most attempts fall short, includinghow to define SLOs that reflect customer experience rather than engineering vanity, why the whole process collapses without automation, and how AI coding assistants are creating new categories of operational risk worth tracking.

Dinesh Sukhija is a Director of Engineering at Okta, where he leads SRE, security infrastructure, and enterprise security tooling in the cyber defense org. Before Okta, he ran infrastructure and developer experience at Opendoor, where he was an early Cortex customer and helped build the DevEx practice.

In this episode of Braintrust, Dinesh joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to talk about how platform engineering, SRE, and security are changing under AI: why golden paths still matter, why standardization is now an agent problem as much as a human one, and why the three functions may soon belong under one leader.