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

  1. Why DevOps transformations fail in regulated industries, with Merge Ready's Matt Bailey

    5月21日

    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.

    37分
  2. Building a developer platform like a product: Inside The New York Times with Sneha Rao and Ahmed Bebars

    5月7日

    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.

    58分
  3. Rootly's Dan Sadler on why AI coding tools are driving more incidents and why reliability is the product

    4月23日

    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.

    38分
  4. From IC to VP: Engineering Leadership at Every Level, with Box's Tamar Bercovici

    4月9日

    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.

    49分
  5. Rob Zuber on quality, metrics, and what it means to move in the right direction at CircleCI

    3月26日

    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.

    45分
  6. The platform engineering playbook for velocity, quality, and AI readiness at SIXT

    3月12日

    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

    37分
  7. How Thrive Market's SVP of Engineering thinks about reliability culture

    2月26日

    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.

    38分
  8. Unwinding the trillion dollar mistake of over-engineered microservices

    2月12日

    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.

    49分
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予告編

番組について

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

情報

  • クリエイター
    Ganesh Datta
  • 配信期間
    25年 - 26年
  • エピソード
    15
  • 制限指定
    不適切な内容を含まない
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ganesh Datta
  • 番組のWebサイト
    Braintrust by Cortex