Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
April 23, 2026
In This Episode
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.
You’ll learn
Reliability is the product, not a feature of it. If the product is down when customers need it most, nothing else you shipped matters.
A culture that prioritizes reliability is forged by what you praise and reward. Want metrics to improve? The mechanism is public recognition: Slack kudos channels, all-hands callouts, and performance reviews.
There are huge benefits to cultivating operational maturity at Series A. Building a business-critical product forced Rootly into weekly operational reviews, daily dashboard tours, canary deploys, and chaos engineering far earlier than most companies.
Dogfooding builds the empathy that drives reliability. Rootly's engineers use their own on-call product, which gives them direct motivation to improve it. That empathy is hard to manufacture when your users look nothing like you.
AI is increasing incidents, and the answer is better infrastructure around code. Rootly sees incident volumes rising as AI coding adoption grows. Automated tests, canary deploys, and automated rollbacks create confidence regardless of who wrote the code.
Quotes
"A lot of engineers have forgotten that the job is not to write code. The job is to produce business value."
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
"ARR is not just a sales number. ARR is engineering's metric too."
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
"Even if that time goes to zero, say code is now free, software delivery is still incredibly slow because we've optimized only a single portion of that pipeline."
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
"The demands on reliability do not go away. And if anything, they just continue to increase for us."
Dan Sadler
VP of Engineering at Rootly
Timestamps
(02:06)
Defining reliability as a cultural practice, not just a technical one.
(07:50)
How building a business-critical product changes what you invest in and when.
(10:31)
The weekly operational review and daily dashboard tour that keep Rootly ahead of production issues.
(14:54)
What to track at the infrastructure and application layers, and how to tie both back to user experience.
(21:56)
Why engineers need to connect their work to business value, not just code output.
(25:05)
How Rootly built the confidence to launch its on-call product as an early-stage company.
(31:01)
How Rootly rewards reliability-focused behavior across the organization.
(34:58)
Why AI coding tools are driving more incidents, and what to put in place before it gets worse.
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