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.

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, who has spent over a decade at the center of how engineering teams build and ship software. Rob shares his thinking on two challenges that are becoming harder to ignore as AI accelerates output: the quiet erosion of software quality, and the pressure to move fast without a clear sense of direction.

They discuss what made the best QA engineers so effective and why that mindset largely disappeared, how LLMs could help bring it back, and why engineering leaders need to think about metrics very differently depending on whether their teams are scaling a mature system or exploring uncharted territory.

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Boyan Dimitrov, CEO of SIXT, one of the world's largest mobility providers operating in over 100 countries. Boyan shares the story behind SIXT's engineering transformation, from shipping software once or twice a month to running nearly 10,000 deployments a month, and explains how extreme standardization became the engine driving both velocity and quality at the same time.

They discuss the pull-and-push model SIXT uses to drive platform adoption without mandating it from the top, how Boyan built a business case for platform investment by starting with specific problems rather than a platform-first vision, and how years of foundational standardization work is now paying significant dividends as SIXT accelerates its AI strategy.

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.