Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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podcast, Cortex CEO Anish Dhar joined host Hannah Clark to challenge a growing narrative: that software engineering is obsolete in the age of AI.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.

Our first turnkey dashboard gives you a real-time pulse on engineering health. Every chart is interactive: click any bar or data point to drill down into the underlying PRs, commits, or incidents. And we’re just getting started; more dashboards are already on the way!

Whether it's ensuring a new service is fully equipped with security scanning, logging, and monitoring from the start, enforcing production readiness checks during deployment, or providing temporary credentials for a production database, Workflows directly support Engineering Excellence Initiatives around modernization and standardization.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Entity Relationships, a powerful new capability that gives you more flexibility and control over the data model in your IDP. By allowing you to create custom relationships between entities in your catalog, you can model your internal developer portal to accurately reflect your own organization’s taxonomy, letting you better answer deep questions about your environments, releases, packages, and beyond.

Today marks an exciting milestone not just for Cortex, but for every organization looking to foster a culture of engineering excellence. Knowing who owns what is one of the hardest and most important challenges for engineering teams. Without clear ownership, incidents take longer to resolve, migrations stall, and enforcing standards becomes nearly impossible.

With over 50 built-in integrations, Cortex customers have an always-up-to-date, single interface for their engineering priorities, tools, and tasks. But large organizations have a lot of tools. And if you're running internally hosted tools, or for policy or security reasons would prefer to keep your access tokens private, that used to limit what was possible in your internal developer. Not anymore.