Mercado Livre Engineering Culture

This week I read two very interesting articles published on Product’s Guru about how Mercado Livre establishes its engineering culture so that its 18,000 engineers lead product decisions and maintain consistent deployment autonomy through a platform called Fury.

The first article - Part 1: The most productive engineering organization in Latin America that no one is seeing - covers these topics:

• 18,000 engineers, 30,000 daily deployments: Mercado Livre operates at brutal scale, with engineering distributed across 18 countries.
• Only 5% PMs: An organizational model that challenges the big tech standard and delivers more with less bureaucracy.
• Fury: The internal platform that changed everything.
  • Continuous deployment
  • Automatic rollback
  • Self-service provisioning
  • Full infrastructure abstraction (Kubernetes, CI/CD, AI)
• GitHub Copilot at scale:
  • Used by more than 9,000 engineers
  • About 50% reduction in coding time
  • Frictionless execution culture
• Deployments without approval meetings:
  • Independent and stable microservices
  • Observability with predictive alerts
  • Teams with autonomy and accountability
• Practical lessons:
  • Scale != headcount
  • Platform > process
  • Useful AI = less engineering overhead
  • Microservices need support, not just architecture

The second article - Part 2: How Mercado Livre sustains technical autonomy at scale - covers these topics:

• 18,000 engineers, fewer than 1,000 PMs: A ratio of 1 PM for every 18 engineers. At Meli, engineers lead product decisions.
• PM != product owner: At Meli, context defines leadership, not job title. Engineers are evaluated by their ability to think about product, not only by writing code.
• Lean and effective organizational model:
  • No committees or PMO
  • Squads define backlog and solutions
  • PMs (when present) facilitate, not command
  • Quarterly strategic direction with local freedom
• Peer accountability culture:
  • Public pull requests
  • Accessible metrics
  • Cross-squad review
  • Transparency as a quality mechanism
• Fury: the platform that enables real autonomy:
  • Manages more than 24,000 microservices
  • Automated CI/CD, rollback, auditing, observability
  • Serverless and region-scalable infrastructure
  • Integrated with AI (Verdi, GitHub Copilot)
• Engineering as the center of product decisions:
  • Teams where the engineer proposes and the PM complements
  • Direct access to metrics, logs, NPS, and support
  • AI as a relief tool, not a replacement
• Core lesson: Meli does not reduce PMs for cost reasons, but for a strategy of autonomy and smart scale. Engineering is treated as product - and that changes everything.

Sebastian Barrios explains more details about the platform in the video Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day. In this other video, Plataforma Fury no Mercado Livre, Diego and Juliano also talk about how the Fury platform helps company engineers.

For anyone who wants more content, Mercado Livre maintains a Fury Platform page and a Tech Blog with technical articles.