Bilt Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
First, we run companywide AI hackathons where all regular work pauses, allowing our entire team to focus on leveraging cutting-edge AI tools. This has produced remarkable results, including a comprehensive set of AI instructions for our codebase, Model Context Protocol servers and reusable workflows for pull request creation and review. These outputs aren’t just prototypes — they’ve transformed our development practices.

We also host biweekly “pizza, wings and drinks” knowledge-sharing sessions where team members present technical discoveries in a casual environment that encourages experimental thinking.

Most importantly, we encourage experimenting with new technologies even when it temporarily affects velocity. For example, we’ve adopted GCP Spanner for our benefits recommendation engine, dramatically improving scalability, and introduced GoLang services despite being primarily a Java shop. Not every experiment is adopted across the company, but there’s also value in finding out what doesn’t work, and therefore we even consider a “failed experiment” a success.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
Our innovation mindset has tangibly elevated our work quality. The AI workflows developed during a hackathon have dramatically accelerated our development cycle, while our AI-powered pull request creation and review tools consistently catch subtle bugs and edge cases that human reviewers might overlook.

Another example is our adoption of an outbound proxy infrastructure that centralizes fault tolerance and flow control at the edge. This introduced comprehensive capabilities including retry logic, circuit breaking, throttling and caching. Beyond performance improvements, this architectural shift enhanced security by creating a single monitoring point for all egress traffic.

Our experimental introduction of Golang services has yielded measurable benefits with reduced memory footprint and faster startup times. These improvements translate directly to applications that deploy more quickly, scale more efficiently and run more cost-effectively.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
Our openness to new technologies has cultivated a learning culture where personal growth and company success go hand in hand. And most importantly, I think most engineers will agree that there’s something really exciting about being able to tinker with the latest and greatest technologies and workflows out there, especially when you can do it with your team.