#S2.19 Agentic Engineering at Scale: Inside Delivery Hero's 18x Software Factory - Rodrigue Schäfer
Shownotes
In this episode we speak with Rodrigue Schäfer, SVP Tech Foundations at Delivery Hero, about what it actually takes to run agentic engineering at scale inside a large, decentralized group. Rodrigue walks through how Delivery Hero moved from ungoverned experimentation with Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Claude and Gemini Code Assist to a single central stack, and why the real driver was governance: security and compliance, usage measurement, cost control and ROI. He explains how they run token-based cost control through the Claude API with per-unit and per-person limits, and why a discovery problem across shared prompts and skills is still open.
The core of the conversation is autonomous software delivery. Rodrigue describes how three principal and staff engineers built the harness before the models were ready, landing a first fully autonomous PR by the end of 2025, and how the numbers then exploded: a Q1 target of 100 merged PRs that finished at 1,800 (18x), a merge rate that rose from about 60% to 83%, and a clear shift toward one-shot merges. He is candid about what this exposes: repo and dependency context is the biggest blocker, human review becomes the new bottleneck, and auto-approving low-risk PRs only works if the DevOps foundations are fully in place, with canary rollouts, automated rollback and a small blast radius.
Beyond the factory, Rodrigue shares two live customer-facing cases. A mature customer service agent resolves more cases successfully yet yields lower customer satisfaction, a tension his team is investigating, and a sales agent gives every restaurant vendor the kind of support that was previously reserved for high-profile accounts, including menu, pricing and campaign proposals. He closes with a reality check on a multimodal model that insisted it could not read images, a cautious view of always-on personal agents and privacy, and a dated prediction: an end-to-end software factory by the end of next year, with agents handling a share of operational incidents because incident load scales with deployments.
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Beyond Vibe Coding Podcast is a project by Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer, partnering with Impala Search. The content is created by us and our guests. Join the discussion on LinkedIn or visit www.bvc.fm, where we publish all episodes. For questions and inquiries, feel free to contact us via LinkedIn. Thank you for your time and see you in the next episode.