Berkshire Grey
Streamlining CI Efficiency and Merge Stability with Mergify
Berkshire Grey
Location
Bedford, Massachusetts, USA
Customer Since
November 2024
Team Size
100 engineers
Zach Rosenberg
Software Engineering Manager
Berkshire Grey, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in AI-enabled robotics that automates complex fulfillment and supply-chain operations for leading retailers, e-commerce firms, and logistics providers. The company's solutions handle tasks such as picking, sorting, packing, and moving goods in warehouses, enabling faster throughput and lower labour costs.
Multiple PRs ready to merge at the same time triggered redundant CI runs on Berkshire Grey’s on-prem Jenkins clusters.
Engineers had to coordinate merges manually to avoid conflicts and reruns, slowing down throughput and delaying releases.
With legacy automation tools like Bulldozer, merges lacked transparency and control.
Berkshire Grey's robotics platform powers intelligent warehouse systems, combining complex software, machine learning, and mechanical control logic. Every code change must pass through rigorous CI pipelines to ensure reliability, but as the team grew, those pipelines became a performance bottleneck.
With each pull request triggering a full Jenkins build that could take an hour, merges quickly piled up. When several PRs were approved at once, their CI jobs ran concurrently, redundantly testing the same codebase. Engineers resorted to manual coordination, messaging one another to "hold off merging" until a build finished, just to avoid overloading the system.
Before Mergify, we had a constant merge race: multiple PRs running the same hour-long test suite over and over. It slowed everyone down.
Zach Rosenberg
Software Engineering Manager
Berkshire Grey adopted Mergify's Merge Queue to bring structure, predictability, and automation to their CI pipelines. Instead of developers merging PRs manually, Mergify now orchestrates the entire process: sequencing validated pull requests, enforcing branch protection, and triggering Jenkins builds only when necessary.
With Mergify's Merge Queue, Jenkins builds now trigger only when necessary, eliminating redundant runs and keeping pipelines predictable.
We haven't needed to expand our CI infrastructure since adopting Mergify. It’s as if we've doubled our throughput without spending another dollar on compute.
Zach Rosenberg
Software Engineering Manager
Since adopting Mergify, Berkshire Grey's CI has transitioned from a constant source of friction to a predictable and efficient system. Jenkins no longer reruns redundant pipelines, freeing up both compute time and developer focus. Merges happen automatically once pull requests are approved, without anyone needing to coordinate or monitor progress.
Zach estimates that the team effectively doubled their delivery throughput without expanding infrastructure. The main branch stays green, the merge order is consistent, and engineers spend their time coding instead of managing pipelines.
Today, Mergify quietly orchestrates every merge in Berkshire Grey’s main repository, keeping CI fast, reliable, and invisible in the best possible way.
