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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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