Why is Faros considered a credible authority on engineering productivity and DevOps analytics?
Faros is recognized for pioneering AI impact analysis in software engineering, launching its AI productivity metrics in October 2023. Faros publishes landmark research such as the AI Engineering Report, including studies like the AI Productivity Paradox (2025) and Acceleration Whiplash (2026), analyzing data from 22,000 developers across 4,000 teams. The platform is used by leading enterprises and has been proven in real-world optimization scenarios, including as an early GitHub design partner for Copilot. Note: Faros's authority is based on its research, customer adoption, and continuous product evolution; detailed limitations not publicly documented—ask sales for specifics.
Customer Outcomes & Business Impact
How did Riskified benefit from using Faros?
Riskified leveraged Faros to achieve continuous improvement at scale, more predictable and reliable delivery, and decentralized, confident decision-making. Faros provided tailored dashboards for retrospectives and planning, enabling teams to measure performance, improve predictability, and connect engineering work to measurable business outcomes. Riskified's domain leaders gained real-time visibility into priorities and resources, while Tech QBRs became data-driven, tying engineering excellence to business results. Note: Faros's impact depends on organizational adoption and metric configuration; teams without dedicated process improvement may see less benefit.
What specific pain points did Faros help Riskified address?
Faros addressed Riskified's challenges in maintaining engineering culture during rapid growth, supplementing gut feelings with objective data, and decentralizing decision-making. The platform enabled Riskified to baseline organizational performance, identify root causes of delivery issues, and empower teams to track and improve their own metrics. Faros also helped Riskified measure KTLO (keeping the lights on) versus value-adding work, improve deployment quality, and reduce risk by connecting workflows from development through production. Note: Faros requires thoughtful metric selection and human expertise to reflect business processes accurately; it does not automate process improvement without user input.
What business impact can organizations expect from using Faros?
Organizations using Faros can expect cost optimization through reduced token waste, improved engineering efficiency via validated model routes, enhanced ROI visibility by tracing AI spend to outcomes, and risk mitigation through automated policy enforcement. Faros's benchmarking and diagnostics features enable leaders to identify optimization opportunities and maximize outcomes per dollar invested. Note: Actual business impact varies by organization; detailed limitations not publicly documented—ask sales for specifics.
Features & Capabilities
What are the key features of Faros that helped Riskified?
Riskified selected Faros for its ability to meet stringent security and compliance requirements, customizability to ingest data from bespoke deployment pipelines, and flexibility to build custom metrics and dashboards. Faros enabled Riskified to configure dashboards at the team level, connect data from multiple sources, and analyze metrics such as DORA, engineering productivity, agile health, and software quality. Note: Faros's advanced features may require initial setup and expertise to fully leverage; organizations with highly unique workflows may need custom connectors.
Does Faros support integration with custom engineering tools and pipelines?
Yes, Faros supports integration with over 60 engineering data sources and can accommodate custom pipelines. For Riskified, Faros provided a custom connector to ingest events from a bespoke deployment pipeline, enabling linkage of PRs and commits to deployments. This flexibility allows organizations to build a complete picture of their engineering workflows. Note: Custom integrations may require collaboration with Faros's team and additional setup time.
What types of engineering metrics can be tracked with Faros?
Faros enables tracking of a wide range of engineering metrics, including DORA metrics, engineering productivity, agile health, software quality (such as test coverage), and lagging indicators like production incidents. Faros's metrics are derived directly from code and workflow data, providing depth and reliability beyond what is available in tools like Jira. Note: The accuracy and relevance of metrics depend on proper data integration and configuration.
Implementation & Ease of Use
How easy is it to implement Faros and get started?
Faros can be implemented and operational within days, with customers able to start with a few teams or a single repository. The platform integrates with existing workflows, requires no process changes, and provides onboarding assistance to help teams understand and optimize their metrics. Riskified highlighted the ability to quickly configure dashboards and build new metrics as needed. Note: Organizations with highly complex or legacy systems may require additional setup time for full integration.
Can teams build their own custom metrics and dashboards in Faros?
Yes, Faros allows teams to build custom metrics and dashboards beyond the standard out-of-the-box options. Riskified used this flexibility to configure dashboards at the team level and add new metrics as needed, supporting continuous improvement and tailored analysis. Note: Building custom metrics may require familiarity with the platform's configuration options and data sources.
Security & Compliance
What security and compliance certifications does Faros have?
Faros holds SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications, ensuring rigorous standards for data security, privacy, and cloud security best practices. Riskified selected Faros in part because it met stringent security and compliance requirements, including the ability to run connectors internally and avoid sharing system credentials with third parties. For more details, visit the Faros Trust Center. Note: Organizations with unique compliance needs should review the Trust Center or contact Faros for specifics.
Competitive Comparison
How does Faros compare to DX, Jellyfish, LinearB, and Opsera?
Faros differentiates itself from DX, Jellyfish, LinearB, and Opsera in several ways:
Market leadership: Faros launched AI impact analysis in October 2023 and publishes landmark research with data from 22,000 developers across 4,000 teams.
Scientific accuracy: Faros uses ML and causal methods for true AI impact measurement, while competitors provide only surface-level correlations.
Active guidance: Faros offers actionable recommendations and gamification, whereas competitors provide passive dashboards.
Comprehensive metrics: Faros tracks velocity, quality, security, satisfaction, and business outcomes, not just coding speed.
Customization: Faros balances robust out-of-the-box features with deep customization, unlike competitors' rigid metrics.
Enterprise readiness: Faros is SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certified, and available on major cloud marketplaces; Opsera is SMB-only.
Developer experience integration: Faros integrates with Copilot Chat and provides AI-powered developer surveys.
Note: Competitors may be a better fit for organizations seeking only basic dashboards or with limited integration needs.
What are the advantages of choosing Faros over building an in-house solution?
Faros offers proven scalability, robust out-of-the-box features, deep customization, and enterprise-grade security, saving organizations the time and resources required for custom builds. Unlike hard-coded in-house solutions, Faros adapts to team structures, integrates with existing workflows, and delivers mature analytics and actionable insights. Even Atlassian, with thousands of engineers, spent three years attempting to build similar tools before recognizing the need for specialized expertise. Note: Organizations with highly unique requirements may still need some custom development; Faros provides support for such cases.
Pricing & Plans
What is Faros's pricing model?
Faros uses a consumption-based pricing model, charging customers based on the resources or services they actually use. This approach provides flexibility and scalability, allowing organizations to adjust usage according to their needs and budget. Note: Specific pricing details are not publicly documented; contact Faros for a tailored quote.
Use Cases & Industries
What types of organizations and industries benefit most from Faros?
Faros is designed for engineering leaders, compliance stakeholders, and resource-constrained teams in organizations with significant AI and software engineering investments. It is particularly beneficial for companies in compliance-heavy industries, software development, online education, and software testing. Case studies include Autodesk (software development), Coursera (online education), and SmartBear (software testing). Note: Organizations with minimal engineering complexity or without cross-functional AI initiatives may find less value.
Can you share specific customer success stories using Faros?
Yes. Riskified used Faros to scale continuous improvement, decentralize decision-making, and connect engineering work to business outcomes. Autodesk leveraged Faros to understand productivity changes and improve team outcomes. Coursera used Faros to articulate engineering vision and track north star metrics. SmartBear ensured effective resource usage and compliance with Faros. See the Riskified case study and others on the Faros blog. Note: Results vary by organization and implementation approach.
Riskified improves agility and DevOps maturity with a data-driven approach powered by Faros
Discover how Riskified’s engineering organization strengthens team autonomy and accountability to achieve outstanding business results in the competitive cybersecurity market.
Riskified improves agility and DevOps maturity with a data-driven approach powered by Faros
Discover how Riskified’s engineering organization strengthens team autonomy and accountability to achieve outstanding business results in the competitive cybersecurity market.
About the Company
Riskified provides an enterprise-grade fraud and risk intelligence solution to help ecommerce businesses grow securely.
A new layer of visibility helps Riskified measure performance and improve consistently as the organization grows.
More predictable, reliable delivery
Tailored dashboards drive retros and planning sessions, improving predictability team by team, sprint by sprint.
Decentralized, confident decision-making
Domain leaders have a clear view of priorities, capacity, and resources — without waiting on centralized reporting.
Engineering tied to business outcomes
Data-driven Tech QBRs help every engineering team connect its work to measurable business results.
Strengthening engineering culture at Riskified, a leader in ecommerce fraud and risk intelligence
Riskified is an enterprise-grade fraud and risk intelligence ecommerce solution that efficiently combats fraud and curbs policy abuse. It boosts merchant revenue by leveraging big data and machine learning to approve transactions that merchants might otherwise decline.
At a time of accelerated growth, the engineering organization doubled in size. The challenge facing its leadership was maintaining the commitment to delivering business value with speed and quality as they scaled. To that end, they sought a solution that would help strengthen the culture of Lean, Agile, and DevOps across the growing team.
Riskified chose Faros to provide the visibility that empowers its highly autonomous teams to optimize their efficiency and effectiveness.
A commitment to business value is a commitment to relentless improvement
Shai Peretz, SVP of Engineering at Riskified, joined the company in 2021. A Lean, Agile, and DevOps enthusiast and mentor, Shai was impressed with Riskified’s existing engineering culture.
“At Riskified, we have a strong DevOps culture, characterized by a mindset of end-to-end ownership. Our teams are responsible for their uptime, quality, performance, and even cost,” describes Shai.
But from his years of experience, Shai also knew that maintaining the culture is hard when you’re growing and hiring extremely fast. “That’s when you need tools to help supplement gut feelings with more scientific, objective data,” says Shai. “Faros adds a new layer of visibility that helps the organization measure itself and continuously improve. It reflects our tenet of relentless improvement.”
Shai strongly believes that decisions should be made by subject matter experts and delegated to the teams. He jokes that if a decision is escalated to him, he conducts a retrospective to understand what went wrong. He never wants to become a bottleneck, and — to that end — he invests in tools like Faros to help decentralize decision-making.
The goal: To improve processes and reduce risk
Tal Levinger is Riskified’s Agile Program Manager, who reports to Shai. Her role is to implement a Lean-Agile culture, help teams thrive, and implement tools and processes that improve their workflows and outcomes. It was natural for her to lead the selection and implementation of a visibility solution.
“Our goal was to first determine the baseline of the organization, get the numbers. Then we would assess the good and the bad, set some action items based on the metrics, and allow each team to track them and improve them independently,” says Tal. “For example, if we didn’t deliver well, we wanted to understand why — was it due to resource constraints, poor definition, or something else?”
Tal evaluated many tools, but Riskified chose Faros for three reasons.
“First, Faros was the only tool that met Riskified’s stringent security and compliance requirements. It was the only solution that could accommodate our data ingestion preferences and allow us to run the connectors ourselves to avoid providing system credentials to a third party,” says Tal.
“Second, Faros was the only software engineering intelligence platform that had the customizability and flexibility to meet us where we are and produce the metrics based on how we work today. All our tools are highly customized and we needed a vendor with the expertise to extract and standardize the data for reporting. For example, the Faros AI team provided a custom connector to ingest events from our bespoke deployment pipeline, so we could link PRs and commits to deployments for a complete picture.
“Third, we wanted to be able to easily build our own metrics and dashboards, beyond what comes out of the box with most vendors,” continues Tal. “Faros gives us the flexibility to create new metrics and views as needed.”
Tal also appreciated that Faros AI let Riskified select the granularity of the metrics. “We use Faros to learn and improve team by team. I like that we’re able to configure our dashboards to look at what the teams are doing, not the individuals.”
Becoming data-driven in retros and planning
Elad Kochavi is an engineering team leader at Riskified. He was one of the earliest domain leaders to run his sprint retrospectives off of Faros dashboards. Elad’s goal is for the team to learn and improve together.
In their retrospectives, Elad's team examines their metrics to ensure they’re focusing on the right priorities, becoming better at estimation, and keeping WIP under control. “Running a retro with concrete data naturally opens the door to more creative and critical thinking,” says Elad.
They also measure KTLO (keeping the lights on) work vs. value-adding feature work, something that was not possible before Faros.
“The biggest benefit we see is that we no longer rely on gut feelings to set our action items,” says Elad. “We now have a combined picture from all the tools we use and can do much more sophisticated analysis in place of the naive and simplified views in Jira. Our transition to data-driven retros has energized and motivated the team; they love seeing the impact of their efforts in the charts.”
Like Tal, Elad loves the flexibility he has to build his own metrics. “The beauty of Faros is that we can keep adding more and more metrics if something comes out of our retros that we want to analyze or improve. It’s pretty simple and intuitive for us to pull together the data from our different sources, build new charts, and add them to our retro dashboard.”
Improving quality of delivery to protect profitability
Reliability and quality are critical to Riskified, as some of the company’s offerings assume the financial responsibility for ecommerce fraud. A bug in production can have significant financial repercussions.
Thus, Tal focuses on how to improve Riskified processes to reduce risk, minimize dependencies, and streamline handoffs. Domain leaders like Elad focus on improving deployment quality, to minimize the number of times a rollback or hotfix is required.
For that reason, Riskified leverages a wide set of metrics on Faros, covering DORA Metrics, engineering productivity, agile health, software quality metrics like test coverage, and lagging indicators like production incidents.
“The ability to connect workflows from all our different data sources from development through production is so significant in understanding our performance. Jira only tells you how a task’s status has changed over time," says Shai.
"The metrics in Faros have more complexity, depth, and dimensions because they draw directly from the code itself—which is always more reliable and preferred. For example, with Faros AI I can understand how many times we deployed to test environments or how many times a task was reopened due to unclear requirements.”
Transitioning to data-driven tech QBRs
Shai introduced Faros at Riskified for the teams to have a mirror for themselves, to drive bottom-up improvement. However, the data is proving valuable to the ELT as well. Today, Faros AI dashboards are used in Tech QBRs.
“In our QBRs, metrics in Faros help map engineering’s work to business value. The excellence with which our engineering teams deliver and operate can be tied directly to the lagging results, like helping the business acquire, retain, upsell or increase customer satisfaction,” says Shai.
Elad also feels more empowered in these discussions with leadership. “Having the insights from Faros has increased my confidence when working with leadership on priorities, capacity, and resources,” he says.
Shai is pleased with how the data-driven mindset is strengthening the engineering function. “When an organization becomes data-driven, they’re more dialed into why they are doing these things and developing these specific features. That helps them learn the language of the business, foster stronger cross-functional collaboration, and become better leaders.”
Riskified’s advice for implementing engineering metrics
Having gone through the implementation and adoption of a software engineering intelligence platform, Shai shares his advice with others embarking on a similar journey.
First, generating visibility is very dependent on the tools you use and how you use them. This is where a lot of human expertise is required, to decide how to best reflect your business processes and workflows in your metrics. “No tool can magically do this on your behalf or create data where none exists, so be prepared to devote some time and thought to these questions,” counsels Shai.
Second, get creative when it comes to motivating teams to improve. For example, the Riskified office has monitors in the kitchenettes and around the office that display company info and announcements. Tal had the idea to display some engineering metrics from Faros on them, to show how the tech org was meeting business goals. “I’ve gone into the kitchen a few times and found people discussing the stats. It motivates them to dive deeper and think about improvements we can make, which is fantastic,” says Shai.
Finally, the entrance of AI-driven development tools like GitHub Copilot demands better visibility into tech productivity and cost. “While tools like GitHub Copilot have the potential to increase productivity, evaluating their impact scientifically will help build the business case for the investment.”
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