Braintrust by Cortex

Ganesh Datta

Candid conversations with the builders shaping the future of engineering.

Braintrust dives into the operational realities of running high-performing engineering organizations, from production readiness and migrations to AI adoption and operational excellence.

Hosted by Ganesh Datta, CTO & Co-founder of Cortex

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20 episodes
Updated Thursday

Episodes20

Newest first

Thursday · 34 min
Your platform is your business, encoded onto your infra, with Syntasso's Abby Bangser
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Abby Bangser, a platform engineering leader at Syntasso and former lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to talk about why AI agents need real platform APIs, not raw cloud credentials. Abby and Ganesh dig into what business requirements actually look like when encoded into a platform, from compliance and labeling to disaster recovery and regional decisions. They talk through why markdown "skill" documents are no substitute for real APIs and deterministic tools that enforce constraints by design. Abby introduces the Etsy analogy: platform teams are like the engineering org at Etsy, responsible for building the marketplace itself rather than knitting the sweaters. And she makes the case against distributing IaC templates to end users, arguing that an API layer separating producers from consumers is what lets a platform evolve without breaking everything downstream.
July 16 · 45 min
Trust is for people, confidence is for tools: Tealium's Dr. Martin Nettling on reviewing AI-generated work
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dr. Martin Nettling, Senior Director of Engineering and Head of QA at Tealium, to explore the distinction between trusting people and having confidence in tools, and why that difference matters as AI becomes part of every engineering workflow. Martin and Ganesh discuss the augmented author model, where engineers take full responsibility for AI-generated outputs rather than treating the tool as the author. They get into what breaks when AI writes your Jira tickets or pull requests without a human validating the thinking, why the ability to trace any decision from organizational strategy to production logs is a chain teams can't let break, and how organizations can build genuine confidence in automation without automating away the exercises that actually make teams learn.
July 2 · 41 min
Your Ops Review is Theater, and That's the Point: Aleks Rudzitis on Turning Reliability into a Shared Value
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta talks with Aleks Rudzitis, Principal Engineer at AWS, about how the structure and theater of ops reviews can turn reliability into a shared organizational value. Aleks explains how error budgets make reliability standards concrete rather than aspirational, why async reports can't replace the psychological weight of a live meeting with leadership, and how AI has made it feasible to backfill tests and even formal verification proofs that were previously too labor-intensive to justify. He also shares what it takes to get an ops review program off the ground in organizations that don't already have the habit.
June 18 · 29 min
Operational excellence (OpEx) reviews: the weekly meeting that actually changes behavior
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually sticks. Shawn and Ganesh walk through why senior leadership presence is non-negotiable for the process to matter, and why fully automated reporting is the difference between a meeting that sustains and one that dies. They cover golden signals, SLOs, and how error budgets help teams balance feature work against reliability investment. They also discuss how AI coding assistants are introducing new operational risks around code review quality and flaky tests, and why AI agents may eventually act as a chief of staff—surfacing the why behind the metrics so teams can act on patterns instead of just observing them.
June 4 · 36 min
Okta's Dinesh Sukhija on meeting AI with AI, and the convergence of platform, SRE, and security
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Engineering at Okta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the relationship between platform engineering, SRE, and security. Dinesh explains why platform teams must treat engineers as users and run real discovery before building. They get into how paved paths have evolved from code scaffolding to guardrailing AI-generated code, controlling token usage, and approving models. Dinesh also makes the case for meeting AI-generated threats with AI defenses, and explains how he sees platform, SRE, and security converging into a shared safety function at organizations shipping at AI speed.
May 21 · 37 min
Why DevOps transformations fail in regulated industries, with Merge Ready's Matt Bailey
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain. Matt and Ganesh discuss why compliance can be mostly automated rather than a mandatory bottleneck, how to turn 30-day approval processes into continuous audit readiness through controls as code, and why treating platform teams as product teams drives natural adoption. They also explore decision latency as a core organizational problem, the importance of stakeholder management as a DevOps skill, and how AI agents may shift infrastructure drift management from prevention to embrace.
May 7 · 58 min
Building a developer platform like a product: Inside The New York Times with Sneha Rao and Ahmed Bebars
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization. Sneha and Ahmed explain why developer platforms need a product mindset alongside engineering, how renaming their team from Delivery Engineering opened a broader strategic mandate, and why SRE and reliability belong inside the platform rather than a separate function. They also share how to think about build vs. buy, when to start a platform function, and why AI is another evolution in the platform story rather than a revolution.
April 23 · 38 min
Rootly's Dan Sadler on why AI coding tools are driving more incidents and why reliability is the product
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan explains how Rootly treats reliability as a product feature rather than just a technical metric, and why culture might be the most impactful element of building reliable systems. Dan and Ganesh discuss weekly operational reviews that tie technical metrics back to user experience, how load testing and chaos engineering help Series A companies mature faster, and why dogfooding their own on-call product creates better engineering decisions. They also explore a concerning trend in Rootly's customer data showing that AI coding assistants are driving more incidents, and why reliability practices become even more critical as code generation speeds up.
April 9 · 48 min
From IC to VP: Engineering Leadership at Every Level, with Box's Tamar Bercovici
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box, who spent 15 years at the company growing from senior IC to leading its core platform organization, to talk about what engineering leadership looks like at each level of the org. Tamar walks through how the job fundamentally changes as you move from manager to director to VP, including a key shift at director level where you stop working within constraints and start reshaping them. She and Ganesh dig into how AI is less a new challenge than a pressure test on existing engineering practices, and why teams with strong CI/CD and observability will move faster while undisciplined teams will struggle. Tamar also shares a mentorship pairing program where engineers already effective with AI coach those still learning, sometimes reversing the usual seniority dynamic. And she explains how Box's platform team connects internal standardization directly to external customer value through security, access control, and product cohesion.
March 26 · 44 min
Rob Zuber on quality, metrics, and what it means to move in the right direction at CircleCI
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI. Rob shares how the industry's move away from dedicated QA has cost teams more than they realize, and explains how AI is changing what good software quality actually looks like. Rob and Ganesh discuss why velocity without direction is the wrong thing to optimize for, how LLMs can help teams think like a great QA engineer again, and what it takes to run exploration and core systems teams at fundamentally different speeds. They also get into why traditional delivery metrics fall short for innovation work, and what to measure instead when teams are discovering rather than just executing.
March 12 · 36 min
The platform engineering playbook for velocity, quality, and AI readiness at SIXT
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Boyan Dimitrov, CTO at SIXT. Boyan shares how SIXT went from releasing software once or twice a month to nearly 10,000 deployments per month, and explains the platform engineering philosophy that made it possible. Boyan and Ganesh discuss why velocity and quality don't have to be a trade-off, how SIXT's standardization work paid off unexpectedly when AI arrived, and what it looks like to build a platform that earns its own adoption. They also get into how to measure platform value with cycle time and product ROI, and what starting from scratch would look like in an AI-first world. https://www.cortex.io/podcast
February 26 · 37 min
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 12 · 49 min
Unwinding the trillion dollar mistake of over-engineered microservices
Steve Evans, former SVP of Engineering at Chegg, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why the microservices revolution created a new class of hidden costs that most engineering organizations never see coming. Steve shares his firsthand experience watching a 300-person org slowly get dragged down by an expanding empire of micro-repos, and why the real damage shows up not in outages, but in the cognitive tax on developers every single day. Steve and Ganesh discuss why traditional engineering metrics like cycle time and deploy frequency can paint a dangerously misleading picture, how business context breaks down as it cascades through an org, and why round tables—not all-hands meetings—are the best way to diagnose where context stops flowing.
January 29 · 27 min
How to shift engineering culture by focusing on incentives, not mandates
Jeff Schnitter, Solution Architect at Cortex and former developer experience leader at Workday, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why changing engineering culture requires starting with pain points rather than jumping to solutions. Jeff shares his experience shifting from a standardization mindset to an outcomes-based approach, the critical lesson that software development is "more faith-based than tech-based," and why new employees are uniquely valuable for questioning the status quo.
January 15 · 28 min
Why production readiness at Xero starts with the customer, not the checklist
Fred Mare, a principal engineer at Xero, joins Ganesh Datta to explore why production readiness should be framed around the customer experience rather than internal operational concerns. Fred shares Xero's approach to confidence scores—a signal that aggregates quality metrics, change size, and test coverage to predict the impact of any deployment on end users. Fred and Ganesh discuss criticality tiering based on customer jobs to be done, why automation is essential to avoid overloading engineering teams, the inseparable relationship between security and production readiness, and why the best advice for starting a production readiness program is to start small and treat it as a journey.
Dec 18, 2025 · 38 min
Why the "artisanal" approach to coding is holding engineering teams back
This week, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta discusses the evolution of platform engineering with Kaspar von Grünberg, CEO and co-founder of Humanitec. Kaspar draws a sharp contrast between the "artisanal" method of software development and the industrialized approach required for modern enterprises. He argues that relying on individual heroes to "YOLO" their way through deployments is unsustainable, and that true scale demands standardized, reliable systems. Ganesh and Kaspar unpack why standardization doesn't kill creativity, the critical difference between "rigid paths" and "Golden Paths," and why treating your platform as a product is non-negotiable. They also discuss the emerging role of AI, arguing that AI agents are effectively a new class of "junior engineer" that makes robust platforms more essential than ever.
Dec 4, 2025 · 40 min
How Google Cloud's DORA is helping teams balance AI acceleration with engineering fundamentals
Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud, joins Ganesh Datta to explore how AI is reshaping software delivery—and why the fundamentals matter more than ever. Nathen shares insights from DORA's 2025 report on AI adoption, the surprising finding that AI acts as an amplifier of both good and bad practices, and the critical shift teams must make from chasing elite performance to driving elite improvement. Nathen and Ganesh discuss value stream mapping as a planning tool for 2026, why SLOs are becoming more important in an AI-first world, the trust paradox in AI adoption, how to use AI as a catalyst for cultural change, and why measuring lines of code generated by AI misses the point entirely. They also explore how foundational practices like working in small batches, strong version control, and user-centric focus become even more valuable when AI is writing more of your code.
Nov 20, 2025 · 30 min
Canva's strategic approach to internal developer tools and why they should spark joy
Tyler Davis, a software engineer at Canva, joins Ganesh Datta to explore how internal tools can be a source of joy and leverage for engineering teams. Tyler shares Canva's multi-year journey building their internal developer portal on Backstage, the moment they realized scorecards could transform operational excellence, and the eye-opening decision to switch to Cortex despite significant investment in their homegrown solution. Tyler and Ganesh discuss their thinking around build vs. buy, how to measure the value of internal tools beyond traditional ROI, the psychology of sunk costs, and more.
Nov 6, 2025 · 29 min
Navigating the path from startup speed to enterprise scale
In the first episode of the Cortex podcast, co-founders Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta pull back the curtain on the journey of building an internal developer portal from the ground up. They share the story of the early days, when the unproven market required moving at maximum velocity to find product-market fit and win critical first deals. The conversation explores the key moments that forced a fundamental mindset shift from prioritizing speed to engineering for enterprise-grade reliability and scale. Anish and Ganesh discuss the cultural and architectural decisions that defined this transition and offer a playbook for engineering leaders navigating today's AI-driven landscape, where the pressure to move fast is greater than ever.
Oct 29, 2025 · 1 min
Introducing Braintrust
How do you balance speed and quality when your customers are counting on you? What does it actually take to build a culture of reliability? And how should engineering leaders think about AI when it's changing everything about how we ship software? On Braintrust, Ganesh Datta, CTO and Co-founder of Cortex, sits down with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical leaders who've been in the trenches—the ones who've made the hard calls, shipped through the chaos, and built teams that actually work. They talk about the real stuff: the architectural decisions that come back to haunt you, the cultural rituals that keep teams aligned, and the practices that separate high-performing teams from everyone else. Whether you're leading a team of ten or a thousand, if you're trying to ship faster without breaking things, this podcast is for you.