How Niyo Achieved 2,000 Releases a Month, While Strengthening Compliance

Niyo, a fintech with 160+ engineers, achieved 2,000 releases a month, 80% fully self-serve deployments, policy-as-code InfoSec governance, and the ability to deploy air-gapped infrastructure for partner banks, all under 6 months.

The Growth Inflection Point

In the early days with 10 developers, everyone had production access and shipped directly. As the team grew to 100+ engineers (160+ people across the full product, design, and engineering function), the infrastructure and processes needed to evolve alongside.

Scaling beyond the initial setup. The handoff model between development, QA, and DevOps, common in organizations at this stage, was reaching its natural limits. Hiring experienced DevOps engineers was significantly harder than hiring application developers, creating a persistent talent bottleneck.

The context gap. Every release passed through a pipeline that was structurally designed to lose information at every transfer:

"A developer would have been working on that feature for the last seven to ten days. They will have the full context. And by the way, the SRE or DevOps person who is supposed to implement that change in production, they will have even less context." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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IaC alone wasn't the answer either. Teams had experimented with Terraform and CloudFormation, but with 20+ deployments sharing common resources (databases, VPCs, service endpoints), raw Terraform state became a coordination problem. IaC needed a product layer that understood pod boundaries, intent, and governance.

"We were at a point where we knew platformization of DevOps had to happen. We had the right intent and engineering DNA. We just needed the right platform to bring it all together." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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Why Niyo Chose Facets

Niyo evaluated several options before choosing Facets. Three things made the decision clear:

1. Product-vision alignment: Facets understood the context-gap problem from the inside. The founding team came from the same ecosystem and had experienced the same information loss at handoff. The product was designed to capture structured intent, not just automate deployment steps.

2. A platform, not a tool: Niyo didn't want another enterprise product that would constrain them. Facets offered a platform that served their existing needs while growing alongside them, including the ability to co-build solutions for novel requirements.

3. Growth-stage chemistry: Niyo valued working with a partner who matched their speed and ambition. Facets brought nimbleness and a willingness to build features Niyo needed, sometimes on short notice.

"A hyper-growth company wants nimbleness, and the last thing they want is an enterprise product that actually binds them. Facets was also growing fast. We thought this would be the best bet for us." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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How Facets Transformed Niyo's Engineering

Release Velocity: 60 Releases a Day

With Facets in place, Niyo's release velocity increased dramatically. The team now ships approximately 2,000 releases per month, a run rate of roughly 60 releases per day, enabling them to take on more work, more pods, and deliver faster than ever. For a company that treats nimbleness as its primary competitive advantage, this was a defining milestone.

80% Self-Serve Deployments with Governance Built In

Niyo achieved what every regulated fintech needs but few accomplish: developer self-service without compromising governance. For 80% of releases, developers and pod leads deploy without needing any approval. The platform enforces governance rules, firewalls, and compliance policies automatically.

The 20% that require explicit InfoSec approval are not a failure of automation. They are a deliberate design choice: areas where human judgment is genuinely necessary: new network changes or new access privileges. This balance reflects Virender's philosophy of solving governance at the blueprint level: plan for it upfront, and it never has to slow you down.

InfoSec: From Parallel Verification to Policy Architecture

When Facets was first introduced, InfoSec ran parallel manual verification alongside the platform to validate its decisions. Over months of operation, the platform demonstrated zero divergence from manual review. No surprises, no gaps. Gradually, InfoSec shifted from verifying the platform's output to designing the rules the platform would enforce.

"The policy should be in the code. We don't need a setup where InfoSec is working as a gatekeeper, checking everything. Now we have automated systems so that folks can actually do higher-order things. The mindset change has happened because the platform has shown that it is possible." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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The result: InfoSec moved from audit function to architecture function. They are now designers of guardrails, not checkpoint reviewers.

A Common Language Between Dev, Ops, and Security

Facets solves the context-gap problem at the structural level. Instead of communicating intent through free-text JIRA fields, where a developer's 7-10 days of context collapses into a half-baked form, the platform captures structured, typed intents that travel with the deployment artifact.

All three stakeholders (development, operations, and security) now operate on the same interface. The developer's intent doesn't degrade at handoff. It's encoded in the artifact itself. This transforms "self-service" from a workflow convenience into a systems architecture argument: when the platform holds the context, the handoff model stops being a liability.

Air-Gapped Deployments for a Regulated Banking Partner

As part of regulatory requirements with a partner bank, Niyo needed to deploy workloads into the bank's own air-gapped infrastructure. The bank's regulations required that workloads never leave their own data perimeter: no internet access, no outbound connectivity. Standard cloud deployment workflows simply didn't apply.

The fallback path would have been painful: mirror everything happening on Facets, strip it down to raw Terraform, and rebuild a separate deployment workflow for the partner bank's cluster. Duplicated effort, diverging configs, and a separate developer experience for a subset of workloads.

Instead, Facets proposed and built a new capability: Niyo could continue working on the Facets platform (same interface, same developer experience) and export deployment artifacts. Those artifacts could be transferred to the bank and executed in an air-gapped environment.

The developer experience is identical regardless of which path deploys. The air-gap complexity is invisible at the developer's interface.

"That was a brilliant rabbit-out-of-the-hat kind of trick. Facets proposed that solution. It wasn't on the platform yet, but they were confident enough to build it on fairly short notice. Brilliantly done and nicely executed." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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This capability now serves as a reusable blueprint for any future regulated banking partnership. As Niyo expands to more banking partners with data-residency or air-gap requirements, the same architecture applies. Not a one-off effort, but a repeatable pattern.

Looking Ahead: The 10x Developer Vision

Niyo's philosophy is clear: shift-left everything. The goal is to empower developers end-to-end, from security scans near the developer environment to observability and runtime monitoring, so that the tooling makes every engineer a 10x developer.

"We think of our developer as an LLM, and the powers and skills that Facets brings as MCP. Suddenly, my LLM can do more productive work, more first-time-right. We are very, very excited about that opportunity." - Virender Bisht, Co-founder & CTO, Niyo

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In Virender's charter for his team: a developer should be as capable as a marketer, and a marketer should be able to develop and ship things. With AI and the right tooling platform, that convergence is within reach. The next 6-8 months, with AI integration maturing, represent one of the most significant productivity shifts the engineering profession has seen.

Strategic Value Delivered by Facets

Before

• A lean DevOps team built for 10 engineers was struggling to serve 100+ engineers across 12-15 product pods. The handoff model had reached its natural limits.
• Change requests arrived at DevOps and InfoSec stripped of the 7-10 days of engineering context behind them. Half-baked forms meant interpretive risk at every handoff.
• Hiring experienced DevOps engineers was significantly harder than hiring application developers, creating a persistent talent bottleneck
• Teams had experimented with Terraform and CloudFormation, but with a large existing resource footprint, complex inter-dependencies, and InfoSec governance requirements layered on top, IaC alone was not enough
• InfoSec operated as a manual verification layer on top of all deployments, running parallel checks on every change while simultaneously auditing the platform they were supposed to trust

After

• ~2,000 releases per month, at a run rate of ~60 releases a day, with pod leads fully self-equipped to deploy, without adding DevOps headcount
• 80% of all releases go out with zero approvals. Governance is enforced automatically by the platform.
• InfoSec moved from running parallel verification to designing the guardrails themselves, moving from audit function to architecture function
• Air-gapped deployments to a regulated banking partner handled seamlessly through Facets, with a reusable blueprint for future banking partnerships