In tech, a major outage can be a dramatic, all-hands-on-deck event, sometimes even making headlines. Outages that are avoided completely don’t get nearly that kind of attention. This cultural imbalance, where teams are praised for heroic firefighting rather than methodical fire prevention, can be dangerous. How can we shift the focus towards proactive quality and make the invisible work of operational excellence visible?
This talk explores how Canva is tackling this challenge by leveraging Cortex’s Scorecards. We'll share our journey of transforming operational excellence from an abstract ideal into a concrete, measurable, and organization-wide priority. By defining clear quality standards—from documentation and test coverage to security posture and on-call readiness—and tracking them with automated scorecards, we provide every team with an objective view of their services' health beyond metrics like CPU usage and application alerts.

Key Takeaways

• Operational Excellence requires both top-down and bottom-up attention
• By incentivising fire management in the same vein as fire-fighting, we can end up with less fires to fight
• Scorecards give visibility into clear action items to reduce operational risk

What if your developers never had to waste time spinning up repos, wiring CI/CD, or provisioning infra again?

At Blackstone, we turn that into reality by using Cortex Workflows to automate the repetitive parts of software delivery — freeing engineers to focus on building. We plug these workflows into our Internal Developer Portal and power them with Developer Guilds: expert-led groups that define best practices, review templates, and keep standards aligned across the org.

The result? A system that moves fast, scales cleanly, and keeps devs in flow.

In this session, you’ll see how we:

• Automate the boring stuff without sacrificing security or control
• Use Developer Guilds to turn standards into something teams actually use
• Build a platform that helps engineers move faster and ship better software

Great developer experience doesn’t happen by accident — it’s built with intention. In this session, learn how H&R Block uses smart automation and targeted platform initiatives to streamline engineering workflows, reduce cognitive overhead, and give developers back their focus.

You’ll walk away with practical strategies for:

• Automating the repetitive to unlock velocity
• Designing internal tools that scale with your teams
• Driving real impact across your org with thoughtful DevEx investments

If you’re looking to level up engineering productivity and satisfaction across your organization, this session is for you.

Join Chris as he chronicles the evolution of Platform Engineering at Klaviyo — from late-stage VC-backed unicorn to IPO and becoming a public company.

In this session, you'll learn:

• How the platform team scaled to support hypergrowth while helping hundreds of engineers ship faster, safer, and more autonomously
• Lessons on navigating org changes, building internal platforms, and balancing long-term bets with short-term delivery

Whether you're just starting or scaling an existing platform, you'll get a front-row seat to how platform engineering evolved at one of the most ambitious software companies of the last decade.

Engineering teams drown in overlapping “excellence” programs; operational excellence, security grades, data governance, etc. Each measured differently and enforced ad-hoc.

At Skyscanner we replaced that sprawl with a single, lightweight governance flow:

• Three repeatable maturity levels (Baseline → Mature → Advanced) that translate policy into business priorities.
• A consolidated scorecard set surfaced through our internal developer portal, giving every team the same set of scorecards to work on, limiting the proliferation of scorecards.
• A lightweight, self-service workflow for proposing, refining and retiring standards, so the boring stuff is standard and innovation isn’t stifled.

Building an Internal Developer Portal is just the start. The real challenge (and value) lies in getting developers to actually use it.

Many IDPs struggle not because of technical shortcomings, but because they overlook the human side of adoption. Misaligned incentives, fragmented metadata, workflow disruption, and cultural resistance can stall even the most well-designed platforms.

In this session, Paxos shares hard-earned lessons from the field - unpacking the common non-technical pitfalls that derail adoption and offering proven strategies to overcome them. You’ll learn how to:

• Build trust in automation and metadata
• Partner with early adopters and champions
• Embed your IDP into real developer workflows
• Treat your IDP like a product, not just a platform

Whether you’re just starting or mid-rollout, this talk will help you turn your IDP into something developers want to use - not something they’re told to.

The world's leading financial institutions don’t get to “move fast and break things”, they move fast and break nothing.

In this panel, engineering leaders from Bank of America, Blackstone, and Xero share how they drive engineering excellence by building modern platforms that enable speed, security, and stability at scale.

We’ll explore how these teams empower developers without compromising compliance, how they measure reliability, and how a culture of excellence drives customer trust. Whether it’s guardrails, golden paths, or zero-downtime deployments, you’ll hear actionable insights on what it really takes to build with confidence in the financial world.