PayFit is a leading European HR and payroll platform serving thousands of businesses across the continent with their innovative SaaS solutions. As one of Europe's fastest-growing HR tech companies, PayFit continues to expand rapidly across multiple markets. Their engineering organization faced a classic scale challenge: maintaining development velocity while managing an increasingly complex codebase distributed across multiple repositories.
With a lean but highly strategic platform team of just four engineers responsible for frontend tooling, design systems, monorepo health, and CI/CD infrastructure, PayFit needed maximum efficiency to compete in the demanding startup landscape. When deployment cycles stretched from 2-5 days per feature and teams abandoned their shared monorepo due to poor initial implementation, the company was at a critical inflection point that threatened their competitive advantage in the fast-moving European HR tech market.
Challenge
Payfit's journey with Nx began with a top-down mandate that didn't include the necessary knowledge transfer or support systems. This led to a predictable outcome: teams abandoned the monorepo entirely. At a critical tipping point, engineering teams extracted themselves from the shared workspace, prioritizing autonomy over the collaborative benefits that a well-managed monorepo could provide.
The consequences of this fragmentation were severe:
- Deployment complexity – Deploying a single feature required navigating multiple repositories and systems sequentially, taking between 2 and 5 days to complete.
- Lost development velocity – Teams accepted slower development pace as the cost of independence.
- Fragmented ownership – No clear ownership or maintenance of shared tooling and infrastructure.
- CI/CD inefficiencies – Each repository required its own CI setup and optimization, leading to duplicated effort and inconsistent performance.
In a startup environment where speed to market is crucial, these delays were becoming a significant competitive disadvantage.
Solution
Nicolas Beaussart joined Payfit as a staff engineer with a clear mission: revive the monorepo and restore development velocity. Rather than forcing teams back immediately, the platform team took a strategic approach focused on proving value through execution.
The team focused on making the monorepo a compelling choice rather than a mandate:
- Invested in monorepo health – Properly configured Nx with task inference to ensure everything worked smoothly out of the box.
- Leveraged Nx Cloud – Implemented Nx Cloud to dramatically speed up CI performance and eliminate the manual optimization burden.
- Pilot program approach – Started with a few pilot teams to migrate back and demonstrate the benefits in practice.
- Created social proof – Early positive feedback from pilot teams served as validation for other teams considering the migration.
Offloading Complexity with Nx Cloud
One of the most significant improvements came from adopting Nx Cloud to handle CI optimization. This shift from manual CI optimization to automated intelligence freed the platform team to focus on higher-value work while ensuring optimal performance.
The number of hours we spent optimizing CI before, trying to load balance in CircleCI, the different number of agents that we run ourselves by hand... it was painful and we spent hours and days trying to do that. The main thing with Nx Cloud is that we don't have to think about that.
The strategic approach paid off. Positive feedback from pilot teams created a snowball effect:
"Slowly but surely it went into a snowball effect where now teams want to migrate themselves back into the monorepo directly themselves."
This organic adoption was far more sustainable than the original top-down mandate, as teams could see the concrete benefits in their daily work.
Results
Dramatic Reduction in Deployment Time
The most striking improvement was in feature deployment speed:
- From 2-5 days to 20 minutes maximum – The initial optimization achieved in the October 2024 interview reduced deployment time to 2 hours (a 97% reduction). Since then, the PayFit team has continued optimizing their deployment pipeline, achieving just 20 minutes from branch push to full production deployment across all environments—including merge, dev, staging, e2e, and production.
- 75% faster coding – Features that previously took much longer to code can now be developed in a quarter of the time
A year ago to deploy a feature it took between 2 and 5 days because you had to go through all of the monorepos, all of the systems one by one to be able to deploy that. Today the same feature can be coded in like a quarter of the time and deploying like 2 hours tops (now even down to only 20 min).
Restored Team Confidence in Monorepo Architecture
The platform team successfully reversed the initial exodus from the monorepo:
- Teams now actively request to migrate back to the main monorepo
- 100% positive feedback from teams that have migrated back
- Strong social proof driving organic adoption across the organization
Operational Efficiency Through Automation
By leveraging Nx Cloud's intelligent CI optimization, the platform team eliminated a major operational burden:
- Zero time spent on manual CI optimization and load balancing
- Predictable performance without manual intervention
- Direct support channel with Nx team for any optimization needs
Competitive Advantage in Startup Environment
For a startup where speed to market is crucial, these improvements translated directly to business impact:
"This is critical in a startup world where things need to move fast, and a big part of this answer is Nx and Nx Cloud. Without those pieces, I don't think we could have the same velocity that we have right now."
The transformation enabled Payfit to maintain their competitive edge while scaling their engineering organization efficiently.
