Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Engineering excellence is more than code quality or tool choice. It’s about aligning engineering with business goals, improving systems systematically, and building a culture of continuous progress. In a recent episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast, Cortex CTO and co-founder Ganesh Datta shared lessons from his engineering career.

When launches are delayed or incidents occur, it’s often due to a breakdown in production readiness. Maybe documentation is outdated. Maybe no one’s on-call. Maybe a critical dependency isn’t even known. The truth is, production readiness shouldn’t be a manual checklist. Production readiness needs to be as dynamic as the software being evaluated.

Hi, I’m Bradley. I’m the Director of Sales Engineering at Cortex, and this is how curiosity has shaped my approach to sales engineering and building technical partnerships that drive engineering excellence.

According to Statista, over 85% of large enterprises and nearly 50% of small to midsize businesses will have adopted microservices as part of their software architecture. The shift is clear: organizations of all sizes are moving away from monolithic applications toward microservices to accelerate development cycles, improve scalability, and support continuous delivery. But this architectural freedom comes with a hidden cost, which increases operational complexity.

Hi, Riley Durham here. I’m an Event Marketing Manager and Social Media Marketer at Cortex, and I’m here to share how a culture of autonomy and excellence has opened doors for career growth at Cortex. Before joining Cortex, I worked in the DevSec tool space, wearing multiple hats managing events, demand generation, social media, and direct mail marketing. That variety gave me a solid foundation in full-funnel marketing, but it was joining Cortex that really accelerated my growth trajectory.

On a recent episode of The Product Manager podcast, Cortex CEO Anish Dhar joined host Hannah Clark to challenge a growing narrative: that software engineering is obsolete in the age of AI. His take? Engineering isn’t disappearing, it’s maturing. At Cortex, we work with some of the most forward-thinking engineering organizations at companies like Canva and Fanatics.

The best engineering teams ship quality software quickly, but doing that consistently requires more than just speed. It requires careful attention to reliability, security, ease of maintenance, and developer experience. The Engineering Excellence Summits were designed to create a community of engineering leaders looking to connect with others facing similar challenges, share approaches that are working, and learn what “better” can look like.

To really make an impact, platform engineering teams need to start thinking like product managers. That means deeply understanding their users, measuring outcomes instead of outputs, and tying everything they do to real business value. Organizations who care about total cost of ownership and fast time to value are adopting this mindset.

Last week, hundreds of engineering leaders, SREs, platform teams, and developers joined us for Summer Scoop 2025, our biggest launch event yet. The way that we think about our product development at Cortex revolves around all the different types of users who are in our product every day.

In a microservices setup, tracking a single request across services quickly gets complex. One service calls another, then a third, and your logs don’t line up. The traceparent header carries context between services, so all parts of a request connect back to the start. For example, when a frontend sends a request to an API, which then calls a database service, traceparent it links those calls in the trace. Without it, you’re left guessing how requests flow.