Case Study: Bolt achieves faster, more reliable build pipelines with CircleCI

Bolt engineers own and optimize build pipelines

Bolt, the checkout experience platform used by retailers like Forever 21 and Milk Makeup, needed to scale its CI pipeline as its engineering team and monorepo grew. With more than 500,000 tests running daily, Bolt turned to CircleCI to support faster, more user-friendly test suites and reduce the burden of managing its own CI system.

Using CircleCI’s configurable workflows, pre-built orbs, Slack alerts, and custom compute, Bolt streamlined builds and improved developer ownership. CircleCI helped cut average commit time from 20 minutes to 5 minutes, reduce integration test time from 1.5 hours to 30 minutes, and more than triple test volume—all while keeping costs flat and reducing main-branch breakages.

Bolt

Roopak Venkatakrishnan

Head of Platforms & Infrastructure