I'm Jonathan, and I've just joined Cortex as VP of Engineering.
For the past six years, I served as SVP of Engineering at LaunchDarkly. Before that, I spent over a decade at Atlassian. At both companies, I had the privilege of working on tools that fundamentally changed the way software teams build, ship, and operate their products. These experiences weren’t just professionally rewarding—they shaped my belief in the transformative power of great developer tools.
This belief has defined the mission of my career: to create products that empower software teams to work smarter, deliver faster, and operate with less risk. Today, I’m thrilled to continue that mission at Cortex helping to build another transformative product.
Building for Builders
Over the years, I was able to work on products that made a real difference for software teams—tools that reduced friction, eliminated toil, and let builders focus on building. When great tools elevate the craft of software development, we let teams tackle bigger challenges, dream a little bolder, and change the world.
Tackling Accidental Complexity
The last decade has seen a massive increase in the power of the software we can build. But alongside this progress, the complexity of software systems has increased at an even faster pace.
Services: Architectures have exploded in scale, with organizations managing hundreds or even thousands of interconnected services.
Tools: Each new operational challenge brings another tool into the stack.
Teams: Engineering organization have grown larger and more specialized.
Processes: Teams diverge and develop bespoke processes.
What we’re left with is sprawl—an overwhelming web of services, tools, people, and processes that threaten to slow even the most efficient teams. And as complexity grows, engineering leaders are left without a unified, reliable way to understand and drive the health and progress of their teams and systems.
The Engineering Leader’s Missing Toolkit
When I was an engineering manager, tools like JIRA and GitHub were my lifeline, showing me the ground truth of my team’s progress each day and each sprint. But as the goals, teams, and timelines got bigger my toolkit got worse, not better.
I found myself relying on point-in-time spreadsheets, out-of-date wiki pages, and status meetings. The information I needed became fragmented, my ability to self-serve degraded, and driving meaningful change turned into a wasteful cycle of hunting for data and chasing down people.
Every engineering leader I know is striving to level up their team, boost developer productivity, and foster a culture of Engineering Excellence. Yet, most are attempting to achieve this with tools that feel like paperclips and duct tape. Even when leaders have access to tools, they provide insights into either the people or the software—but rarely both at the same time.
Finding Cortex
Cortex is the product I wish I’d had years ago. It improves life for everyone in an engineering organization:
Developers: Access a single source of truth to understand the who, what, and where of your architecture.
Platform Teams: Drive best practices and streamline operations at scale.
SREs and DevOps Teams: Proactively manage reliability, reduce firefighting, and improve incident response.
Developer Productivity Teams: Identify bottlenecks and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
And for Engineering Leaders, Cortex offers something revolutionary: a real-time, dynamic, accurate system of record—not just for individual services, but for every service you own and the teams and processes that power them. With Cortex we can better understand the deep relationship between people, process and technology. With full-spectrum visibility across everything, we now have a tool to help leaders understand progress, identify gaps, and confidently drive the team toward Engineering Excellence.
Joining the team
Cortex is the product of an incredible team of humans that deeply understands the challenges of modern software engineering -- both human and technical. They’ve built a a product of incredible power, which is addressing significant pain that every engineering team has or will have. If that mission sounds excited for you, come join us! I’m excited to help Cortex shape the future, and improve the way every software team works together.
