Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Sneha Rao
VP of Product Management
Ahmed Bebars
Principal Engineer
May 7, 2026
In This Episode
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.
You’ll learn
Naming defines your scope, and your scope defines your impact. The team was originally called Delivery Engineering, and the name kept them out of conversations about front-end and application-layer work. The rename to Developer Platforms changed both the charter and the tables they were invited to.
A platform team doesn't need a product leader on day one, but it will sooner than you think. Sneha describes the inflection where a platform has grown enough to need someone whose job is pattern recognition, saying no, and preventing a Frankenstein of disconnected tools.
Building a developer platform is a journey, not a Kubernetes cluster. Handing someone infrastructure is not the same as giving them CI/CD, monitoring, cost visibility, and runbooks that work together out of the box.
SRE and FinOps belong inside the platform org because they're not independent trade-offs. Every extra nine of availability has a cost. When reliability and cost optimization sit in separate organizations, those trade-off conversations happen without shared context.
AI doesn't change what a tier-zero outage means to readers. The practices the team has already built (e.g. CI/CD, SLOs, runbooks) become more important under AI, not less. A service that goes down still takes the site with it, regardless of who or what wrote the code.
Quotes
“Every engineer that walks through the doors of New York Times knows how to onboard into our ecosystem, understands the systems they need to work with, has these fine-grained blueprints of how to work with infrastructure. And it's really easy for them to get in. But it's also: what can you now do with that”
Sneha Rao
VP of Product Management
“We care deeply about our developers, their experiences, and enabling them in whatever ways make sense — ensuring that we know how to serve the news and that we can break news in an effective way, and that we run in efficient ways on the cloud.”
Sneha Rao
VP of Product Management
"It's not about how you just give someone a Kubernetes cluster. It's how you give them a Kubernetes cluster that works with CI/CD. But what does that mean when we have scaling problems? What does that mean from a cost perspective?"
Ahmed Bebars
Principal Engineer
“It's so interesting watching engineers become more product-oriented, and product managers become more engineering-focused. And this is the world we're living in. Our roles are getting transformed.”
Sneha Rao
VP of Product Management
"Building something is one thing, but operating it is another thing. It's how to focus on operating something long-term so that it doesn't degrade."
Ahmed Bebars
Principal Engineer
"Sure, you could say, 'I want five nines.' Have we considered the cost, operational complexity, and risk-to-reward ratio?"
Sneha Rao
VP of Product Management
Timestamps
(03:48)
What building a developer platform actually means — scope beyond infrastructure vending.
(11:21)
How a product mindset changes the way a platform team operates.
(20:00)
The rename from delivery engineering to developer platforms, and what changed.
(29:38)
Why SRE and FinOps sit inside the platform organization.
(42:27)
Making the case for platform value to leadership and the CEO.
(51:55)
Where AI fits into platform strategy and why existing practices matter more, not less.
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