How health tech company, Alan, grew its engineering team by 45x using CircleCI

The French health tech company, Alan, doesn’t take a traditional approach to DevOps. “We don’t have a DevOps team and we don’t want a DevOps team,” says Rémy-Christophe Schermesser, Principal Engineer at Alan. “We want every engineer to be available to work on any part of the stack.”

Alan’s engineering organization has prioritized autonomy and automation from the beginning, which is why they started using CircleCI back when they only had two developers. Today, there are 90 engineers at the company but they still operate like a small team. By using automated deployments on CircleCI, Alan has been able to achieve 45x growth without slowing down. “We prefer to use our engineering time to make features instead of maintaining our infrastructure,” Rémy-Christophe says.

Empowering engineering teams

CircleCI has played a crucial role in empowering Alan’s engineering team to move fast and make decisions. With CircleCI’s intuitive interface and ease of use, Alan’s developers can quickly integrate CI/CD into their daily workflows. The automated checks, tests, and deployments enable engineers to focus on their core tasks, improving their productivity and collaboration overall.

Using CircleCI has significantly contributed to developer happiness and productivity at Alan. Developers love that they can focus on building new features and improving the application, and the simplicity of CircleCI’s platform makes onboarding new engineers a seamless process.

Ensuring a qualitative healthcare product

A large part of Alan’s mission is to deliver a qualitative healthcare product. “We have a few leadership principles in the company,” says Rémy-Christophe. “One of them is what we call ‘member first,’ meaning that we want to provide the very best experience for our members.”

CircleCI’s automated tests provided Alan with help to maintain the highest standards of the user experience, ensuring their application functions securely and without error. The ability to integrate with various testing frameworks and tools allows Alan to enforce data integrity, security, and privacy, addressing the sensitive nature of health data.

With seamless integration between CircleCI and their development process, Alan can deploy changes to staging and production environments multiple times a day, reducing their time-to-market.

Long-term scalability

As Alan scaled their business, CircleCI proved to be a reliable and scalable CI/CD solution. CircleCI seamlessly accompanied Alan’s growth, accommodating an expanding engineering team and an increasing number of data scientists. CircleCI’s scalability and flexibility enabled Alan to increase their CI/CD pipelines without the need for significant infrastructure changes or a dedicated DevOps team.

“We didn’t need to change CircleCI when we were small and now that we’re a mid-size company, I don’t foresee us changing anything for the next few years. I think CircleCI will be able to accompany us pretty easily.”

CircleCI has become a fundamental pillar in Alan’s engineering practices. By empowering engineering teams, streamlining their CI/CD pipeline, and ensuring a secure healthcare product, CircleCI provides the platform that drives Alan’s business forward.

About Alan

Alan’s mission is to make a healthier, longer life accessible to everyone. Alan is the ultimate one-stop health partner: seamlessly integrating health insurance, family medicine, occupational medicine, coaching, and therapy, to boost the health, wellbeing, and engagement of people. Alan has partnered with over 20,000 companies and 400,000 members in France, Spain, and Belgium, achieving a Net Promoter Score of more than 65, and €280m ARR with 60% YoY growth. Interested in working at Alan? Check out their careers page.