I’m Ken, and I recently joined the Cortex team as the VP of Marketing.
In every role I’ve had, I've been drawn to the same fundamental question: How can we empower technical teams to do their best work? Today, I'm thrilled to join the team at Cortex, where we're building the future of engineering excellence.
My career has been defined by a fascination with how teams work and how technology can make them work better. Before joining Cortex, I led marketing for Labelbox and was responsible for evolving the go-to-market motion in a rapidly changing AI market. Prior to that, I worked with teams building incredible developer tools to improve the speed, quality, and security of software development at Atlassian and Semmle (now part of GitHub).
Fueling Engineering Excellence
I'll admit it—I'm a process nerd and a problem solver at heart. I love diving in to understand how teams and organizations operate, identifying friction points, and figuring out how we can do things better. It's what gets me up in the morning.
Cortex is doing exactly this for engineering teams everywhere, and it's awesome to see. Engineering excellence has become the defining challenge of modern software development, and for me, the best teams are the ones always ready for what comes next. They have the information and context they need to make decisions and move quickly.
I learned this firsthand during my early days at Atlassian, watching teams struggle to maintain quality and velocity as they scaled. Decision making got slower as complexity increased. Services grow, tools multiply, teams innovate independently, and processes diverge. Add AI to that mix, and what emerges is a web of complexly interconnected systems that even the most talented leaders struggle to understand and improve.
That's where Cortex comes in. Cortex cuts through this complexity, giving engineering leaders the context and clarity they need to be decisive and move quickly. With Cortex, engineering teams are always ready to go.
Why Cortex, Why Now?
It’s exciting to see my past experiences converging at Cortex in ways that feel almost inevitable. Beyond the product-market fit, I joined the Cortex team because of the people, the company values, and my belief in the product and the IDP market.
People: From my first conversation with co-founders Anish and Ganesh, I could tell they're building this company for the right reasons. They're passionate about the problems they're solving and committed to bringing together exceptional people to build something great. The team was clearly full of smart, passionate people unafraid of hard problems.
Company values: The core values resonate deeply with me: taking on big challenges, collaborating to solve complex problems, and moving the business forward together.
Product: Cortex is driving engineering excellence and doing it in a way that feels both ambitious and achievable. We're leveraging AI to give engineering teams the visibility and control they need to take action and excel, not just survive.
Market: With advances in AI, engineering teams are evolving faster than ever. With that comes a greater need for IDPs, and Cortex is primed to lead the market.
What's Next
I'm excited to help shape not just the products we build, but also how we take them to market to deliver maximum value to our customers. The IDP space is at an inflection point, and Cortex has the team, the product, and the vision to define its future.
If you're passionate about solving hard problems and helping engineering teams do their best work, come join us. You can find open positions on our careers page, and I'd love to see you at IDPCON where we'll be sharing more about our vision for the future of engineering excellence.
