There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the entire year.

Stripe has roughly 8,500 employees (BI, 2025). 40% or so in engineering (Forbes, 2022). With some napkin math assuming a similar distribution today, that would mean on average each engineer ships at least 1 change to production every 3 days. That is pretty incredible for the scale at which Stripe operates ($1.4 trillion(!) payment volume in 2024).

Though Stripe is well-known for their strong engineering culture, a number like that really puts things into perspective. According to DORA 2024 (research by Google on software delivery & operations) elite software delivery performance does "multiple deploys per day" with a 5% failure rate. It's probably not a stretch to say Stripe is in the top 1% of elite performers by these measurements alone.

One thousand one hundred forty-five deployments to production. Per day.

To achieve that kind of delivery performance with that many people is honestly amazing. On its own, the "1 change to production every 3 days" per engineer might get mixed reactions. "We did 5 production deploys in one day at company XYZ!". But did they do it consistently for an entire year? With less than a minute of downtime?

It's not impossible but just thinking about the throughput really says something about how the ship is being run. Shipping safely at this velocity and scale implies heavy investment in automated tests, deployments, rollbacks, observability, code ownership and so forth. All those things pop-up in your favorite flavor of devops survey but you rarely see it operationalized at this level.

There are quite a few nuggets scattered on the internet regarding how Stripe does things (ex. #1, #2, #3) and in general the conclusion is that they have a very demanding but very advanced engineering culture.

[...] what I learned at Stripe was nothing like I had experienced in more than 20 years in the industry.
What I Learned At Stripe (Steinkamp, 2022)

Few companies operate at Stripe's scale, intensity and mission-critical level. But that shouldn't be a deterrence for aspiring to this kind of clarity, confidence, and velocity in engineering. It's a reflection of engineering culture done right; trusting changes, the tooling necessary to do that, autonomy of engineers and a relentless focus on continuously shipping value for users.

The goal is not 1,145 deployments per day. It's removing the friction that makes that pace impossible. What's really stopping you from rapidly shipping value to users?