How Back Market scales mobile faster, and drives sustainable growth with Bitrise

Summary

Back Market is on a mission to make refurbished tech a trusted, more sustainable alternative to new, with its mobile app central to delivering that promise. For eight years, Bitrise has powered its mobile CI/CD, helping scale the mobile engineering team from 5 to 30, automate release pipelines, and continue to raise app quality. Now, as Back Market expands in the US and embraces agentic AI, Bitrise provides the robust mobile platform it needs to make refurbished tech a trusted mainstream choice.

Challenge

Back Market was founded with a bold mission: to  make refurbished tech a compelling alternative to new by delivering quality, value and a trusted customer experience.

A decade later, the company has become a one-stop marketplace for refurbished technology, serving 17 million customers across 17 markets and helping avoid over 2 billion kg of CO₂ emissions.

Historically, Back Market was more web-first than mobile-first. As its customer base and markets evolved, mobile became a larger part of the customer experience, particularly in the US. That led the company to invest more heavily in mobile engineering capabilities.

But its mobile development setup wasn’t keeping pace and its generic CI/CD solution lacked the flexibility modern mobile development demands, from supporting multiple OS versions to keeping pace with frequent iOS and Android releases.

"When we started to focus on building out our mobile engineering team, it became clear that our existing CI setup wasn’t able to meet all our requirements for mobile.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

Back Market was looking for a mobile-specialist CI/CD solution that could support its automation needs, release reliability targets, and rapidly growing engineering team.

Back Market’s key requirements

• CI/CD built for mobile
• Automated pipelines to accelerate builds
• Specialist support for growing mobile team
• Seamless app performance across devices
• Partnership aligned on sustainability goals

Solution

“We needed CI/CD that was purpose-built for mobile, and Bitrise was the most advanced option. That made the choice pretty straightforward.”
_{‍Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

Back Market adopted Bitrise eight years ago to give its mobile team a CI/CD foundation built specifically for mobile. Since then, the platform has become central to its mobile infrastructure, helping the team automate key workflows, accelerate builds, test across multiple OS versions, and maintain a high-quality app experience across devices and platforms. 

Today, Back Market runs dedicated Bitrise pipelines for pull request validation, end-to-end testing, and release builds, all integrated with Runway for release management.

“We’ve now using Runway alongside Bitrise, with many of our workflows and release processes built around automated pipelines. Runway relies on Bitrise to trigger parts of those workflows, and I’m really proud of the automation we’ve built into the process. It represents a huge amount of work from our Mobile Core team.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

One of the biggest ongoing benefits is that Bitrise gives Back Market fast access to the latest platform updates and a wide range of OS versions, enabling testing across the same device environments customers use while ensuring readiness for every new iOS and Android release.

 “The diversity of stacks Bitrise provides is invaluable for us. For example, with our iOS UI tests, we recently switched to iOS 26 to make sure there were no issues with Apple’s latest design requirements. Being able to use the latest OS without only relying on an alpha emulator is very convenient for us. The fact that Bitrise gives us the latest updates almost immediately after release is really valuable.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

More recently, the team extended its Bitrise setup to include Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing developers to review failed builds, inspect logs, and get suggested fixes without leaving their development environment.

“When there's a build failure, our developers can ask the AI Agent to directly check the build on Bitrise and try to find why it's failing. Before, they had to go to Bitrise, check the builds, check the logs manually, etc. Now it's much faster. This is super convenient for us, it gives autonomy to our developers and I think it reduces a lot of the support requests from the product squad engineers to the mobile core one. So we are also able to dedicate more time to valuable work.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

Results

“We see Bitrise as an enabler of our expectations and ambitions, especially around app performance. It gives us the speed, stability, and confidence we need to focus on achieving our  mission.”  
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

• ~25-30% faster build times
  As a result of adopting Bitrise Pipelines, Back Market cut build times from around 20 minutes to 15 minutes, with developer satisfaction peaking at 4.62 out of 5 as a result.
  “The biggest day-to-day win with Bitrise is less stress all around. If you're in a rush and need a PR merged before a release, waiting 20 minutes instead of 40 makes a real difference." 
  _{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}
• ~15 minutes to a production-ready Android release
  Back Market's Android release pipeline now runs in 14-15 minutes end-to-end, covering build execution, automated testing, and store submission. Release pull requests are validated and merged automatically within 30 minutes.
• 6x team growth, rock-solid delivery
  Over eight years, Back Market scaled its mobile engineering team from 5 to 30 engineers, a 6x increase in headcount, code volume, releases, and CI activity. Bitrise absorbed every stage of that growth while driving up performance and reliability.
• Faster troubleshooting with Bitrise MCP
  By connecting AI coding assistants directly with Bitrise, developers investigate and resolve failed builds without leaving their environment or manually searching logs, significantly reducing support requests to its Mobile Core team.
• A partnership built for a sustainable future
  Eight years on, Bitrise is more than a CI/CD platform for Back Market, it's a long-term partner. From responsive expert support on Slack to renewable-powered data centres that align with Back Market's sustainability mission, the relationship is built and ready for what’s next.‍

“Having direct communication with Bitrise is super convenient. Some of our other providers don’t offer that level of support or contact, and it makes a real difference. When we have a question, the Bitrise team always comes back to us really quickly. They’re just great to work and communicate with, no matter what it is.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

The future

Looking ahead, Back Market’s priorities for the next 12–18 months include transforming how the team ships with AI.

“We are experimenting with ways to make AI usage more transparent, including estimated cost and environmental impact. We also share learnings across teams through AI champions and a central team focused on infrastructure, security and responsible usage. Our goal is to use AI as thoughtfully and efficiently as possible.”
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}

Sustainability remains central to Back Market’s future, shaping everything from its culture and values to its supply chain and partnerships. For Back Market, that means working with companies that take their environmental impact seriously in their own practices. Bitrise’s move to EU and US data centers powered by more than 90% renewable energy marks another important step in strengthening that alignment and working together to achieve a more sustainable future.

"Reducing the impact of the digital infrastructure that supports our work is therefore an important part of our sustainability efforts. We value partners that take this responsibility seriously, and Bitrise’s work to increase the use of renewable-powered data centers is aligned with the way we want to build partnerships."
_{Pierre-Emmanuel Altieri, Engineering Manager, Back Market}