Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
March 12, 2026
In This Episode
In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Boyan Dimitrov, CEO of SIXT, one of the world's largest mobility providers operating in over 100 countries. Boyan shares the story behind SIXT's engineering transformation, from shipping software once or twice a month to running nearly 10,000 deployments a month, and explains how extreme standardization became the engine driving both velocity and quality at the same time.
They discuss the pull-and-push model SIXT uses to drive platform adoption without mandating it from the top, how Boyan built a business case for platform investment by starting with specific problems rather than a platform-first vision, and how years of foundational standardization work is now paying significant dividends as SIXT accelerates its AI strategy.
You’ll learn
Shared abstractions freed teams from rebuilding the same foundations, creating capacity for work that actually creates customer value.
The pull is a developer experience compelling enough that engineers want to use it. The push is leaders saying no to redundant technology choices for solved problems.
SIXT solved the most common problems for most teams, then built API-based escape hatches for the 20% with genuinely unique needs.
SIXT's gRPC standard lets them make their entire service layer MCP-enabled quickly. Standardized design systems had them generating full enterprise screens with AI tools as early as April 2025.
The platform team’s role is shifting from building infrastructure toward defining standards and shared context for both humans and agents.
Quotes
"If you want to get something done, there must be pull and push together."
Boyan Dimitrov
CEO of SIXT
"Loose abstractions is the way to go. This allows you to exchange components on the fly, to refuel this plane as it's flying, and to continuously innovate in this space."
Boyan Dimitrov
CEO of SIXT
"It sounds dogmatic, but it works, and it allows for a whole organization at that point to move to a direction. Otherwise, you will never get it together."
Boyan Dimitrov
CEO of SIXT
"Does this product that we ship earn the money that we invested building it? It's pretty simple, really."
Boyan Dimitrov
CEO of SIXT
"It's gonna be about experience and standards. You being able to define that and somehow creating a shared context across your teams, your organization, but also agents."
Boyan Dimitrov
CEO of SIXT
Timestamps
(02:02)
SIXT's journey from two deployments a month to nearly 10,000.
(06:22)
Why standardization improved speed and quality at the same time.
(10:52)
The pull-and-push model for platform adoption.
(12:04)
What a great developer experience actually looks like.
(16:18)
How SIXT's standardization investments are paying off with AI.
(22:42)
What to standardize in an AI-first world and what to loosen up.
(28:32)
How Boyan built the business case for platform engineering at SIXT.
(33:39)
What advice Boyan would give someone starting a platform strategy from scratch.
Other episodes
How Thrive Market's SVP of Engineering thinks about reliability culture
In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Randy Shoup, SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market. Randy shares lessons from his leadership roles across multiple companies and explains how measurement and transparency can help teams build stronger engineering cultures.
Randy and Ganesh chat about how fear can block progress, why recovery speed matters more than trying to prevent every failure, and how teams improve through steady, incremental gains. They also discuss a few practical ways to build trust around metrics so organizations can use visibility for learning instead of punishment.
February 26, 2026
Randy Shoup
SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market
Why great engineering teams don’t accept “normal” errors
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Jeff Schnitter, a Solution Architect at Cortex. Jeff shares insights from his time as a Senior Principal Engineer at Workday, where he led developer experience and release engineering, to explore how organizations can successfully shift their internal culture.
The discussion covers the transition from a "Stockholm Syndrome" mindset where teams accept broken processes to a culture of reliability and security. Ganesh and Jeff also dive into the importance of incentives, the role of leadership in empowering teams, and why the most effective transformations start with identifying individual pain points rather than issuing top-down mandates.
January 29, 2026
Jeff Schnitter
Solution Architect at Cortex
