Building a dev platform like a product: Inside The New York Times with Sneha Rao and Ahmed Bebars
00:00 Developer platforms as the complete journey from idea to production
10:39 Why platform teams need product thinking alongside engineering
20:14 How renaming from Delivery Engineering changed the team's entire mandate
29:25 Why SRE and operational excellence belong inside the platform team
42:11 Platform's horizontal scope and when the investment starts making sense
51:58 Why AI is another evolution in the platform story, not a revolution
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization.
Sneha and Ahmed explain why developer platforms need a product mindset alongside engineering, how renaming their team from Delivery Engineering opened a broader strategic mandate, and why SRE and reliability belong inside the platform rather than a separate function. They also share how to think about build vs. buy, when to start a platform function, and why AI is another evolution in the platform story rather than a revolution.
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