Fidelity International’s developer experience playbook: Making engineering effortless at enterprise scale

In large enterprises, productivity losses rarely stem from a single major obstacle. More often, they accumulate through dozens of small frustrations—searching for documentation, identifying ownership, navigating approvals, or waiting for development environments to be provisioned.

For Fidelity International, addressing these everyday challenges became a strategic priority.

The global financial services organisation has spent the last few years transforming developer experience (DevEx) from a local engineering concern into an enterprise-wide discipline. The result is an engineering ecosystem designed to reduce friction, accelerate delivery, and enable developers to focus on what they do best: building solutions for customers.

“If I had to describe the starting point, it would be the accumulation of small, everyday friction,” says Anurag Varshney, Director – Enterprise Engineering, Enablement Engineering – India, Fidelity International. “None of it dramatic, but together it can slow momentum.” According to Varshney, the turning point came when Fidelity began treating developer experience as a strategic capability rather than an operational issue.  “The shift happened when we started treating developer experience as an enterprise discipline, rather than a team-level concern,” he says.

At the heart of this transformation is Velocity, Fidelity’s internal developer platform. Designed as a single access point for engineers, Velocity brings together documentation, APIs, templates, workflows, and self-service capabilities into a unified experience.

What previously required days of coordination and setup can now be accomplished within hours, dramatically improving onboarding and accelerating contribution from new engineers.

“What used to take days now takes hours,” says Varshney. “For a new joiner, that changes things quite a bit. They are able to move from waiting, to contributing almost immediately.”

Standardisation Without Sacrificing Agility

One of the enduring challenges facing global engineering organisations is maintaining consistency across teams while preserving the flexibility needed to respond to local business requirements.

Rather than relying on rigid controls, Fidelity has adopted what Varshney describes as a framework-driven approach.

“In large global organisations, the instinct is often to create consistency by tightening control,” he says. “We however focus on democratising decision-making.”

A key element of this strategy is the use of “golden paths”—pre-built, production-ready approaches for common engineering tasks that incorporate security, compliance, and resilience by design.

“Our approach has been to make the right way the easiest way,” Varshney explains.

These golden paths are not imposed on engineering teams. Instead, they are designed to be so efficient and reliable that teams naturally choose them.

The standards themselves continue to evolve through engineering communities spanning cloud, data, AI, and platform engineering disciplines. This collaborative model ensures that best practices are shaped by real-world usage rather than top-down mandates.

At an organisational level, leadership forums and advisory teams help ensure that solutions are built once and reused across the enterprise rather than repeatedly recreated in isolated silos.

“The idea is simple: solve problems once for the enterprise, not multiple times in different silos,” says Varshney.

The Business Impact of Better Developer Experience

For many organisations, developer experience initiatives are often viewed as internal productivity programs. Fidelity’s experience demonstrates that their impact extends much further.

A notable example is the standardisation of Kubernetes Helm charts across the enterprise.

Previously, multiple teams were independently creating and maintaining deployment configurations. While functional, this approach resulted in inconsistencies, duplicated effort, and increased operational complexity.

Fidelity addressed the issue by creating a single enterprise-grade Helm chart that was secure, tested, and available across teams. “The immediate benefit was efficiency, with significant manual effort saved across hundreds of applications,” says Varshney.

More importantly, the standardised approach created a stable deployment foundation across the organisation. “Because every team now starts from a stable, production-ready baseline, deployments are far more predictable,” he explains.

The business outcomes have been tangible: faster delivery cycles, reduced release-related issues, fewer service disruptions, and greater confidence in deployment timelines.

“From a business perspective, this shows up clearly – faster time to market as new capabilities reach customers sooner, fewer disruptions through more stable services, and greater confidence in delivery with more predictable timelines.”

For a financial services organisation where customers depend on highly reliable digital platforms, those improvements directly influence customer experience and business performance.

Governance Designed for Speed

Financial services firms operate under some of the most demanding security and compliance requirements of any industry. Traditionally, these controls have often introduced additional friction into software development processes.

Fidelity’s strategy has been to rethink governance itself.

“In our industry, you can’t compromise on security or compliance, but you can rethink how engineers experience it,” says Varshney.

Rather than treating governance as a separate layer, Fidelity has embedded it directly into its engineering platforms and workflows.

Standardised developer environments, approved software catalogues, governed repositories, automated vulnerability management, and self-service capabilities are all designed to make compliance a natural outcome of development rather than a separate activity.

“The principle we follow is simple: if doing the right thing is harder, people will find workarounds. If it’s easier, it becomes second nature.”

The same philosophy now extends to Fidelity’s AI initiatives.

Through programs such as AI in SDLC and platforms like TechMate, governance controls are integrated directly into how engineers access and consume AI capabilities.

“This allows teams to leverage AI not just safely, but at scale,” Varshney notes.

As a result, Fidelity increasingly views governance and velocity as complementary rather than competing objectives. “The balance is no longer governance versus speed. It’s governance designed for speed.”

AI as a Multiplier, Not a Starting Point

While AI has become a major focus across the technology industry, Fidelity’s experience suggests that foundational engineering maturity remains the key enabler of successful AI adoption.

According to Varshney, the organisation’s biggest productivity gains initially came through automation, standardisation, and self-service capabilities.

“Most of the gains we’ve seen haven’t come from AI alone, they’ve come from simplifying everyday work.”

Today, AI is building upon that foundation.

Engineers use AI to accelerate code development, improve access to documentation, and reduce repetitive operational work. Fidelity is also investing in agent skills, MCP templates, agentic workflows, and broader AI-enabled software development practices.

Yet one lesson continues to stand out.

“AI works best when the underlying environment is clean,” says Varshney.

“If documentation is fragmented or outdated, AI struggles. If it’s structured and centralised, AI becomes a real multiplier.”

The observation reinforces an increasingly important reality for enterprises pursuing AI transformation: successful AI adoption often depends more on operational discipline and engineering fundamentals than on the AI technology itself.

Engineering Without Friction

Looking ahead, Fidelity’s vision is ambitious but clear.

Over the next three to five years, the company aims to create an engineering environment where technology increasingly fades into the background and developers can focus entirely on solving business problems.

“AI will become a more active partner—not just assisting with code, but helping guide decisions, surface risks, and automate routine work end to end,” says Varshney.

At the same time, Fidelity plans to continue strengthening collaborative engineering practices such as InnerSource, developer communities, and shared ownership models.

Ultimately, the goal is to make engineering feel almost effortless.

“If I had to summarise where we’re heading,” Varshney concludes, “we’re building an environment where engineers spend almost no time figuring out how to build, and almost all their time focused on what truly matters.”

For Fidelity International, that vision is not simply about improving the developer experience. It is about creating the conditions for faster innovation, stronger quality, and more dependable customer outcomes in an increasingly digital financial services landscape.