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.

Matt Bailey is a DevOps consultant and the founder of Merge Ready, a DevOps community and YouTube channel. He spends most of his time working with large regulated organizations across finance, healthcare, and government, helping them untangle the tooling decisions and processes that stall their software delivery.

In this episode of Braintrust, Matt and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta dig into why buying a new CI/CD platform doesn't count as a DevOps transformation, what "decision latency" costs regulated organizations, and how to automate compliance.

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.

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan shares how building a business-critical product forced Rootly to prioritize operational maturity far earlier than most companies would, and why that discipline is now paying off as AI coding tools push incident volumes higher across the industry.

They also discuss what a genuine reliability culture looks like in practice, the specific cadences Rootly uses to stay ahead of production issues, and why Dan believes the rising pace of AI-generated code makes the infrastructure around code more important than ever.

When Tamar Bercovici joined Box, the engineering team consisted of just 30 people. In the 15 years since, she's worked through every level of the leadership track in the organization and is currently the VP of Engineering. She leads the core platform, which is the backend layer that storage, search, metadata, and Box's AI capabilities all run on.

In this episode of Braintrust, Tamar and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta get into what the job actually requires at each level from IC to VP, why the transition to a director-level role catches people off guard in a way the manager transition doesn't, and how platform teams make the case for their value when nothing they build has a user-facing feature attached to it.