Candid conversations with the builders shaping the future of engineering.

Aleks Rudzitis joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to make the case that the operational review is a human backstop that matters more as AI accelerates how fast teams ship. They discuss why a standing meeting holds where an asynchronous report tends to atrophy, why the review's authority comes from who's in the room rather than the meeting itself, and how the principle Aleks calls "human-driven infrastructure" persists through the shift to agents. Aleks closes on the concept of ‘creating space’: a good ops review exists to begin the right conversation rather than to review graphs for their own sake. He writes about reliability on his blog, Bits and Being. The opinions expressed in this podcast are his own.

Read more from him on operational reviews here and on preventing incidents here.

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex. Shawn has led operational excellence efforts at Microsoft, Uber, and SoFi, and brings a practitioner's playbook for how to actually run these weekly reviews, from automating red/green reports, including senior leadership, and engaging in relentless follow-through on action items.

They dig into the mechanics that make operational excellence reviews successful and the reasons most attempts fall short, includinghow to define SLOs that reflect customer experience rather than engineering vanity, why the whole process collapses without automation, and how AI coding assistants are creating new categories of operational risk worth tracking.

Dinesh Sukhija is a Director of Engineering at Okta, where he leads SRE, security infrastructure, and enterprise security tooling in the cyber defense org. Before Okta, he ran infrastructure and developer experience at Opendoor, where he was an early Cortex customer and helped build the DevEx practice.

In this episode of Braintrust, Dinesh joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to talk about how platform engineering, SRE, and security are changing under AI: why golden paths still matter, why standardization is now an agent problem as much as a human one, and why the three functions may soon belong under one leader.

Matt Bailey is a DevOps consultant and the founder of Merge Ready, a DevOps community and YouTube channel. He spends most of his time working with large regulated organizations across finance, healthcare, and government, helping them untangle the tooling decisions and processes that stall their software delivery.

In this episode of Braintrust, Matt and Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta dig into why buying a new CI/CD platform doesn't count as a DevOps transformation, what "decision latency" costs regulated organizations, and how to automate compliance.