Bilt Innovation & Technology Culture

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.

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

When a company is growing quickly and launching new products, it’s tempting to equate the breadth of offerings with innovation. But we believe innovation comes from doing things the hard way when it leads to a better customer experience. That mindset comes from a culture of constantly questioning every user interaction: Is this step necessary? Can it be automated? How can we meet users where they are instead of forcing them to change their behavior? This approach is what creates truly seamless experiences and builds lasting brand loyalty.

Innovation also shows up in our culture through ownership. We’re a team of builders, not managers, which reduces friction between ideas and execution. When no task is above or below someone, teams move quickly because the people closest to the work make decisions and own outcomes end to end. Ownership means individuals don’t just suggest ideas. They build, test and stand behind them. This creates a culture of fast iteration, accountability and continuous improvement, where innovation is part of everyday execution rather than occasional breakthroughs.

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

Dining was the first category we added when expanding our rewards and benefits program beyond the home and into the neighborhood. Dining loyalty is crowded and fragmented, from punch cards at coffee shops to card-linked offers and restaurant-specific CRM systems and it would have been easy to become another rewards player focused on spend and repeat visits.

Instead, starting from the home allowed us to use our existing loyalty and payments platform to unify the experience across our restaurant network. Members are treated like regulars wherever they dine and receive rewards that go beyond points, such as a courtesy Lyft ride home from your dinner or a complimentary dish that doesn’t have to be “redeemed” but just shows up at the table because we’re integrated directly into booking and POS systems. These deep integrations also enable new experiences, like charging a restaurant bill to your home, similar to billing a meal to your room at a hotel.

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

This is the perennial challenge for fast-paced startups. We balance it by experimenting with a dedicated group of highly engaged customers who want early access to new features. These members understand that what they’re trying may not yet be fully polished, which allows us to shorten feedback loops, iterate quickly and validate ideas with real users before broader release.

At Bilt, this program is called Close Friends. Unlike typical beta channels that skew toward highly technical early adopters, we’ve built it as a community. Early access to features is just one of the benefits our Close Friends receive, along with behind-the-scenes access to our culture, invite-only events and partner experiences. This attracts a more diverse audience, which in turn leads to better feedback, helping us refine products while protecting the stability of the core experience for our broader member base.