How Bilt's Marketing Engineering Team Delivers at Scale with Railway

Bilt, the nationwide loyalty program for renters, faced a familiar challenge: how to move fast without sacrificing engineering velocity. When their marketing team restructured around dedicated engineering pods, they needed infrastructure that could keep pace with their rapid deployment cycles and high-traffic events.

Railway's developer-first platform enabled the marketing engineering team to focus on what matters most: shipping features that serve millions of customers across the country.

Bilt's marketing engineering team operates unlike traditional marketing teams, running full engineering operations with backend engineers, frontend engineers, and full-stack developers building everything from QR code scanning systems for events to an entire booking platform for experiences.

"On the marketing team we move fast. We need our tech stack to allow for that in a scalable, safe way."

— Kartik Aggarwal, Tech Lead at Bilt

Bilt wanted to avoid a common pattern seen across the industry: a web hosting platform for frontend deployments and a hyperscaler cloud platform for backend infrastructure. The pain points they would’ve encounter with this approach were clear:

• Manual deployment processes
• Complex infrastructure management
• Time drain, with too much time spent managing Terraform
• Lengthy onboarding for new engineers to learn cloud patterns

When shopping for a platform provider, Bilt was looking for simplicity.

"Most of the knobs to tweak aren't relevant to a feature-oriented team. I don't need to configure 20 different knobs just to get my feature shipped."

When Bilt evaluated infrastructure platforms, they tested three different solutions with a simple benchmark: how quickly could they deploy their new backend and get a testable URL?

“What takes an hour on Railway could take 10x more on a traditional cloud platform.  Railway was the fastest, giving us the most seamless, no config system. We just connected our monorepo project and then Railpack automatically identified our Node.js projects.”

The productivity transformation was immediate:

• Time to deploy from what would have been a week on a different cloud provider to an hour
• 95% of engineering time spent on feature development
• Zero-config deployments resulted in no manual infra configuration

Bilt operates at significant scale during high-traffic bursts, like the first of the month when most customers pay rent and unique benefits are offered. Their Railway-hosted experiences platform handles this scale:

• 1,500+ requests per second during peak traffic
• Sub-50 millisecond response times under full load
• 32 cores and 32GB RAM per container with cost-effective resource allocation

The generous resource allocation particularly impressed the team as they did not have to request additional resources or go through a lengthy approval processes.

"It was pretty mind-blowing when we saw that we have 32 cores and 32 GBs of RAM per container. The resources per container are really cheap, and there are a lot of them."

With Railway’s pay-per-use model, the large containers handle bursty traffic but don’t require Bilt to pay for the resources when idle.

This resulted in direct cost efficiency when comparing Railway to a traditional cloud provider:

• ~50% lower infrastructure costs than expected
• $200 monthly bill for one service handling millions of requests

The team continues to launch backend projects on Railway, with engineers freed from infrastructure concerns to focus on actually writing code.

Bilt has benefited from Railway’s incredibly responsive support team.

"Something that has really helped build trust from the Bilt side is the Slack channel that we have with your team and how responsive Railway has been, iterating even on smaller feedback. That direct communication has been really integral for us."

The success has created a template for other engineering teams at Bilt who could unlock developer velocity benefits like the marketing engineering team did with Railway.

For engineering managers evaluating infrastructure platforms, Bilt's Railway adoption delivered measurable results.

Railway enabled Bilt's marketing engineering team to operate efficiently at scale—moving fast, shipping frequently, and focusing on customer impact rather than infrastructure complexity.

The platform's developer-first approach doesn't just reduce operational overhead; it fundamentally changes how engineering teams think about and interact with infrastructure, creating a competitive advantage in markets where both velocity and security matter.