From 4-hour builds to 12-minute pipelines for a payments platform
The challenge
A fast-growing payments company had a monolithic CI pipeline that took over four hours to complete. Deployments happened once a week, required manual sign-offs from three teams, and frequently caused weekend incidents. Engineers had lost confidence in the release process.
Our solution
We audited the existing pipeline and identified three root causes: redundant test suites, sequential stages that could run in parallel, and a lack of environment parity between staging and production. We rebuilt the pipeline in GitHub Actions with parallelized test shards, Docker layer caching, and automated environment provisioning via Terraform.