CleverTap Cuts Their Build Times by 75% with Semaphore

As engineering teams grow, CI/CD pipelines often become an invisible bottleneck.

What once worked for a small team starts breaking under the weight of larger codebases, more services, and increasingly complex workflows. Builds queue up. Pipelines become harder to change. Developers lose time—and momentum.

CleverTap, a fast-growing marketing automation platform, hit that exact point while scaling their engineering organization.

Instead of treating CI/CD as just tooling, they rethought how their pipeline should evolve with their system.

Here are five practical lessons from their experience.

1. Scale Before It Breaks

CleverTap’s engineering team grew quickly—along with their monorepo and number of services. Their existing CI/CD setup (Bamboo) couldn’t keep up.

• Build capacity was capped by licensing limits
• Infrastructure couldn’t scale with demand
• Pipelines became a bottleneck for the team

“Our team and codebase was growing very fast… Bamboo just couldn’t keep up.”

Lesson:
CI/CD systems rarely fail suddenly—they degrade under growth.

If your pipeline can’t handle:

• increasing concurrency
• more services
• more complex workflows

…it will eventually slow your entire team down.

2. Remove Bottlenecks by Making Pipelines Self-Service

One of the biggest constraints CleverTap faced wasn’t technical—it was organizational.

Every pipeline change required involvement from the infrastructure team.

“Any pipeline change required the infra team… it wasn’t self-service at all.”

This created friction:

• slower iteration
• dependency on a single team
• reduced developer ownership

By moving pipeline configuration into the codebase, developers gained full control.

“Developers can read it, understand it, and modify it themselves. This alone was a huge unlock.”

Lesson:
If developers can’t change the pipeline, the pipeline becomes a bottleneck.

Treat your CI/CD like code:

• version-controlled
• visible
• owned by the people who use it

3. Eliminate Build Queues with Parallelization

One of the most visible symptoms of a struggling CI/CD system is build queues.

At CleverTap, builds used to sit waiting for available capacity. As the team grew, this only got worse.

By increasing parallelization and scaling their infrastructure, they removed this bottleneck entirely.

“Builds that used to sit in a queue now run immediately.”

The result:

• 75% reduction in build times
• faster feedback loops
• smoother developer workflows

Lesson:
Speed in CI/CD isn’t just about faster machines—it’s about removing waiting time.

Focus on:

• parallel execution
• sufficient concurrency
• minimizing sequential steps

4. Make Pipelines Easy to Understand

As pipelines grow in complexity, they become harder to reason about—especially in monorepos.

CleverTap found that clarity was just as important as capability.

“Even engineers who aren’t familiar with the pipeline can look at it and understand what’s going on.”

This had a real impact:

• faster onboarding
• fewer mistakes
• easier debugging

Lesson:
A powerful pipeline that no one understands is still a bottleneck.

Your CI/CD system should:

• clearly show what’s happening
• make workflows easy to follow
• reduce cognitive load for engineers

5. Treat CI/CD as a System That Evolves

As CleverTap’s architecture evolved, so did their workflows.

They needed more than simple “build → test → deploy” pipelines. Their system required:

• dynamic environments
• approval steps
• flexible deployment flows

“We reconstruct pipelines on the fly… with workflows like ‘promote yes/no’.”

Lesson:
CI/CD is not static infrastructure—it’s part of your system design.

It should:

• adapt to new environments
• support evolving workflows
• enable—not constrain—your team

The Outcome

By rethinking their CI/CD approach, CleverTap achieved:

• 75% faster build times
• 6–7× more concurrent jobs
• No more build queues
• Full developer ownership of pipelines
• Lower overall infrastructure and operational costs

More importantly, CI/CD went from being a bottleneck to an enabler of growth.

Final Thoughts

Most CI/CD problems aren’t caused by a single tool—they’re caused by systems that haven’t evolved with the team.

CleverTap’s experience highlights a broader shift:

• from rigid pipelines → flexible systems
• from centralized control → developer ownership
• from delayed feedback → real-time iteration

If your builds are slowing you down, it’s worth asking:

👉 Is your CI/CD system still designed for the team you are today?

Key Takeaways

• Plan for scale early to avoid bottlenecks
• Make pipelines self-service and developer-friendly
• Eliminate queues through parallelization
• Prioritize clarity and usability
• Treat CI/CD as an evolving system

CleverTap is a marketing automation and customer engagement platform that helps businesses understand user behavior, segment audiences, and deliver personalized experiences to improve retention and growth.

Industry

Marketing automation / Customer engagement (SaaS)

Headquarters

Mountain View, California, USA

Stack