Brex saves $5M by refocusing platform investments with DX

Brex, a high-growth fintech company with over 200 engineers, simplifies finance for businesses with corporate cards and expense management tools. Between 2018 and 2022, the engineering team grew from 10 to over 500, drastically increasing complexity. To address these challenges, Brex formed a platform team to streamline processes and build tools to improve engineering efficiency.

One key platform initiative was to develop an internal developer portal to unify tools and simplify workflows. The investment was substantial: built on Backstage, the portal took two years to develop, growing the platform team from two to six engineers.

Despite this level of investment, the developer portal failed to address developers’ biggest needs as shown by the fact that only 25% of developers visited the portal each week. “We spent two years building an internal developer portal, only to discover it wasn’t solving our developers’ biggest pain points,” shared James Russo, Staff Engineer at Brex.

The platform team recognized the need for deeper, more comprehensive feedback from their customers—Brex’s developers. To address this, they adopted DX. Within weeks, Brex measured the developer experience of over 95% of their developers, uncovering that the top concern wasn’t related to their developer portal but rather local development speed.

Russo explained, “DX made it so easy to see top priorities according to engineers, get comments on the priorities, and benchmark against other companies. When we reviewed the results from DX, the message was clear: our developers’ biggest pain point wasn’t solvable via our developer portal. It was local development speed.”

With this clarity, Brex redirected resources toward developing a hybrid development environment. Within weeks, the platform team delivered a tool that streamlined testing across hundreds of microservices, reducing build times by several minutes per iteration. Developers adopted it immediately, and developer experience scores for local development doubled.

This shift saved Brex over $5 million in two years by improving developer productivity and reallocating resources that would have been spent on the portal. “With DX, our developer productivity teams have been focusing on the right things and delivered more impact in a year than probably the previous 2 to 3 years,” said Russo.

Looking ahead, Brex plans to expand DX across teams and reassess priorities regularly. By aligning investments with genuine developer needs, Brex avoids unnecessary costs and empowers engineers to do work they love. As Russo concluded, “It wasn’t about the tool we built—it was about understanding what our developers truly needed. And we wouldn’t have learned that without asking the right questions.”

Read more about this story on James Russo’s blog