Hosting
Cloud that ran 100% of PicPay's operation as of 2018.
Why: Being fully on AWS let PicPay make the most of explosive growth while keeping the experience good.
Kubernetes (Amazon EKS)sreteams.substack.com
Runs the applications.
Why: The SRE team prefers AWS services that perform well with little management.
Database
Amazon RDSsreteams.substack.com
Managed relational databases.
Amazon DynamoDBbaguete.com.br
NoSQL database among the AWS services PicPay uses.
Build and runtime
Harnesssreteams.substack.com
Deploys new Docker images to the EKS clusters after CodeBuild.
Gradle Develocitydevelocity.ai
Build cache and build scans for the Android builds, locally and in CI.
Why: Developers were losing too much time waiting on Android build and test feedback.
Data fetching
Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)sreteams.substack.com
Event streaming, also used to carry logs.
Amazon ElastiCachesreteams.substack.com
Managed cache for the applications.
Databricksdatabricks.com
Lakehouse that unifies transactions, sales, finance and logs for BI and ML.
Why: The old multi-tool stack on AWS was too complex, slow and hard to share.
Backend framework
AWS Lambdasreteams.substack.com
Supporting functions next to the Kubernetes workloads.
AI model
Rasarasa.com
Conversational assistant that guided users through COVID-19 emergency aid.
Why: It beat IBM Watson on cost and accuracy, is open source and handled Portuguese well.
Analytics
Tableaudatabricks.com
Dashboards on top of the Databricks data.
Mixpanelmixpanel.com
Tracks the signup funnel, A/B tests and individual user journeys.
Why: A new product manager can learn it fast, without writing queries or building dashboards by hand.
Error monitoring
New Relicnewrelic.com
Centralizes logs, telemetry, alerts and executive dashboards.
Why: Incident handling had become slow and the team was buried in alerts.
OpsGeniesreteams.substack.com
Pages the on-call engineer from monitoring alerts.
WhatsApp and SMS
Sendbirdsendbird.com
Powers in-app chat around payments.
Why: PicPay wanted engagement beyond single tasks, and social users transact twice as much.
By 2018 PicPay ran entirely on AWS and used more than 20 of its services, including API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Lambda, RDS and VPC. The COO credited that setup with letting the company ride 2,000% growth in five months in 2017 without hurting the user experience.
Sources:baguete.com.br
PicPay's SRE team favors AWS services that perform well and need little management. In 2022 applications ran on Kubernetes in EKS with some Lambda functions, data sat in RDS, Kafka ran on MSK, and SQS, SNS and ElastiCache covered queues and cache.
CodeBuild runs tests and pushes Docker images to ECR, and Harness rolls them out to the EKS clusters. Filebeat and Logstash stream logs into Kafka, which forwards them to the logging tool and backs them up to S3 Glacier, and OpsGenie pages whoever is on call.
Sources:sreteams.substack.com
As PicPay grew, incident handling got slow and the team suffered from alert fatigue. It standardized alerts and pulled logs and telemetry into New Relic, which cut incidents by 65%, improved time to resolution by 30% and reduced yearly downtime by 51%.
Sources:newrelic.com
The first data stack on AWS stitched many tools together. Pipelines were slow, teams could not share data easily and analysts had no real-time view. PicPay moved to Databricks with Delta Lake and Databricks SQL, which now feeds more than 50 dashboards, cash-back targeting models and fraud monitoring.
PicPay reports $10M saved through smarter cash-back and 50% lower analytics and visualization costs.
Sources:databricks.com
Chat built on Sendbird turns payments into conversations, since socially active users transact twice as much. Mixpanel lets the growth team watch the eight-step signup funnel hour by hour, and a clearer password message found that way lifted conversion by 10%.
During Brazil's COVID-19 emergency aid, PicPay shipped a Rasa assistant in about ten business days to guide users through eligibility. On Android, Gradle's Develocity build cache and build scans sped up slow build and test cycles.
Found on the homepage with the open Wappalyzer rules (HTML, scripts and headers). It shows what runs in the browser, not the whole backend.
Checked on 2026-10-29. Every tool links to the public source that shows it.
