Company overview

Archer is a leader in enterprise risk and compliance management. With a highly distributed engineering organization and multiple global environments, Archer recognized a critical need to modernize and standardize its development practices to work toward engineering excellence.

Joshua Marble, Developer Experience Manager at Archer, is responsible for driving engineering excellence throughout the organization. Here’s how he and his team defined the practice: breaking down silos, automating workflows, and empowering teams to build and ship with confidence, consistency, and speed.

Joshua and the team at Archer chose Cortex to centralize visibility and remove friction by making releases more consistent and reliable They achieved this by standardizing service creation through automated workflows that embed best practices from the start, ensuring every new service is deployment-ready within hours.

Key wins:

• 1

  New services go from concept to deployed in under 3 hours, down from days of manual setup.

• 2

  $72,000 in total savings across 30+ workflow runs in just 3 months

• 3

  Leadership has full confidence in deployment readiness, eliminating a bottleneck that once stalled 9-12 month cycles.

• 4

  Teams across the organization rely on the Cortex Catalog as their daily source of truth.

The challenge: Deployment friction

Before Cortex, deployment readiness was a major source of friction for Archer.

Teams often spent months building services with no clear path to production. There were no shared infrastructure patterns, templates, or deployment standards. According to Joshua: “We had projects that ran for 9-12 months, and no one even knew how or if they could be deployed.”

Each team handled setup manually, leading to inconsistent environments, missing operational requirements, and a support burden that compounded over time.

Without a standard process, there was no single source of truth, no shared definition of what "ready to deploy" meant, and leadership had no reliable visibility into when services would ship.

This is exactly the gap Cortex is designed to close with our Engineering Operations platform. Archer wasn't suffering from a code problem. They were suffering from an operational maturity problem.

Building the Engineering Operations Foundation: Centralized Visibility

Archer used Cortex to build a centralized Catalog that brings together essential service metadata (i.e. ownership, documentation, dashboards, and operational data) in one searchable place.

Support and operations teams now use it daily. The questions that used to require hunting through Slack or tapping a colleague on the shoulder are answered instantly.

Driving Continuous Improvement by Automating the Right Standards

​​Archer's next challenge was operationalizing best practices. Using Cortex Workflows and Scorecards, Archer embedded deployment standards, infrastructure provisioning, and compliance requirements directly into the developer experience.

Teams no longer had to think about governance at release time because it had already been handled at service creation.

With Cortex, Archer achieved a standardized Workflow that takes teams from concept to a fully deployed service on a Kubernetes cluster in under 3 hours. What once took days of manual setup, or months of ambiguity, is now automated, consistent, and repeatable.

Removing Developer Friction

A key focus of Engineering Operations is enforcing shared definitions of "good" across the organization through automated standards, so engineers can focus on building rather than navigating process complexity.

Cortex allowed Archer’s leadership to gain confidence that new services could be deployed within hours, removing a key bottleneck from their 9-12 month project cycles. Developers gained clarity on what "ready" meant. And the organization as a whole moved faster; not because they wrote more code, but because they removed the operational drag that had been slowing them down.

Committing to the EngOps Mindset

Joshua advises teams to stay open to value beyond their original goals. This reflects the broader EngOps philosophy: don't treat these capabilities as isolated tools. Treat them as part of a single operational function. Archer started with a focus on Workflows but later found valuable impact in features like Scorecards and the Catalog.

He also points out that changing habits is key. Developers often rely on familiar, well-established tools they’re already comfortable with. Getting teams to start with Cortex took effort, but it led to better visibility, less manual work, and a more consistent experience.

Conclusion

Cortex has helped Archer replace manual, inconsistent processes with fast, repeatable workflows that make every new service deployment-ready from day one. What once took months can now be done in hours.

As the team builds new Workflows for serverless services and leverages Scorecards to guide migrations and modernization efforts, Cortex continues to power Archer’s push for greater speed, quality, and consistency across engineering.

Ready to build your Engineering Operations foundation? Talk to an expert to define your use cases and start building a frictionless SDLC.