How Mercado Libre uses GitHub

GitHub Enterprise

Mercado Libre frees developers' minds to focus on their mission with GitHub.

~50% reduction in time spent writing code with GitHub Copilot
9,000+ developers using Copilot
100,000 pull requests merged per day

Play video: Accelerating Commerce: Mercado Libre + GitHub

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Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Challenge

As the largest e-commerce and digital payments ecosystem in Latin America, Mercado Libre democratized commerce by enabling anyone to sell products online. But the company faced particular challenges in the region—from internet connectivity and package delivery issues in rural areas to customers lacking bank accounts or credit cards. These obstacles led to the creation of Mercado Pago, an application that enabled online purchases, money transfers, and digital payments.

To keep its more than 10,000 developers focused on building new features that serve users, Mercado Libre needed secure DevOps tooling that would allow developers to be more efficient and focus on providing value rather than repetitive tasks.

The Solution

Mercado Libre standardized on GitHub Enterprise as its development platform, using it to automate deployment, security tests, and repetitive tasks. GitHub is now at the heart of every aspect of software development, with developers, product managers, and designers collaborating across the platform.

A person making a payment on the mobile Mercado Libre app.

Mercado Libre's developers merge and deploy about 100,000 pull requests per day. According to Senior Technical Director Lucia Brizuela, GitHub's user interface and ease of integration turbo-charged the company's speed to market without overburdening the DevOps team. "GitHub enables us to be more collaborative, move faster, and focus more on building new features that improve our customers' lives," Brizuela says.

The company was able to quickly roll out a facial recognition system for Mercado Pago so users can log in securely without passwords—an example of how GitHub helps the team innovate at speed.

GitHub Copilot

Mercado Libre's developer team smiling as they code on their laptops with GitHub Copilot.

Mercado Libre has made GitHub Copilot available to its entire developer organization. The tool has already improved satisfaction and productivity among teams, empowering developers to focus on valuable work while automating repetitive or less engaging tasks.

SVP of Technology Sebastian Barrios reports spending half as much time to arrive at correct code since using GitHub Copilot. "The first time I used GitHub Copilot, it wrote an entire script for me based on a single comment," he says. "In some cases, the code was even better than what I would have done myself. It was quite an amazing experience."

Developers describe GitHub Copilot as transformative. One developer said it was able to predict what she wanted to do so well, it was as though it could read her mind. Barrios likens it to giving every developer an incredibly helpful personal assistant.

Mercado Libre invests in the next generation of developers through a two-month bootcamp for new hires to learn the company's software stack. Brizuela sees vast potential in GitHub Copilot to accelerate this onboarding process and flatten the learning curve for new team members.

GitHub Advanced Security

As a payments provider, security is paramount at Mercado Libre. The company uses GitHub Advanced Security with secret scanning to evaluate every line of committed code for security issues.

"We're able to be more proactive than we had been in the past," says Javier, a developer at Mercado Libre. "We're able to give developers security feedback early, so they can fix potential issues before they find their way into production."

GitHub Advanced Security runs automatically and in the background, staying out of developers' way until intervention is needed. Developers can rest assured that their code is secure without incorporating additional tools and complex processes into their workflows.

Impact

From securing commits to automating boilerplate code to easing deployment, GitHub provides peace of mind for developers at Mercado Libre. "Life without GitHub would be chaotic," Barrios says. "We would have to spend a lot of time working on different functionality that isn't core to our business. GitHub takes care of that and unlocks our potential."