The Wix Engineering 2025 Review: AI, Platforms, Data, and Deep Technical Lessons-Learned
- Wix Engineering
- 18 hours ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 15 minutes ago
A Year of Building at Scale: Inside Wix Engineering
During 2025, Wix Engineering shared deep dives, playbooks, and real-world lessons from building and operating one of the largest web platforms in the world.
These stories don't start as content. They start as engineering challenges - some of the most complex, high-scale, and unforgiving challenges modern software teams face.
Problems that emerge only when thousands of developers, hundreds of teams, and hundreds of millions of users meet production reality.
From AI-first development to platform engineering, data systems at massive scale, and battle-tested reliability practices, each insight shared here was born from hands-on work: from systems breaking, scaling limits being hit, costs spiraling, latency spiking, and teams being forced to rethink assumptions that no longer held.
This blog post is a curated journey through some of the most impactful lessons we learned this year - not in theory, but by building, operating, and evolving complex systems at scale.
AI at Wix: From Strategy to Production
AI wasn't "added" at Wix - it reshaped how we think about development, tooling, and decision-making:
AI-Driven Leadership: Navigating Change & Innovation
Wix's CTO Yaniv Even-Haim and VP Engineering Aviran Mordo discuss leadership, uncertainty, and scaling teams through the AI shift. Watch their full talk:
How AI Is Reshaping R&D at Wix: A Journey, Not Just an Upgrade
A candid look at the technical, organizational, and human challenges of becoming an AI-first engineering org - from architecture choices to developer education and production automation. Get a deeper understanding with this article by Asaf Yonay and watch his insightful podcast video with Gefen Mittelman:
The GenAI Transformation at Wix
Gilad Barkan and Dr. Eli Brosh share how Wix moved from early AI experimentation to building real AI products at scale - and what comes next. Watch:
Building Better AI Systems (Not Just Prompts)
As AI moved into production, engineering discipline became the differentiator.
Building AI Systems vs. Software Engineering / Yuval Nissan
Why building AI systems breaks classic software engineering assumptions - from testing and evaluation to ownership, research, and non-deterministic behavior:
How Wix’s AI Site-Chat Redefines Chatbots / Ran Geler
Combining LLMs with classic ML techniques, live feedback loops, and dynamic knowledge updates - to deliver smarter, adaptive conversations. How Wix's AI Site-Chat Redefines Chatbots with Adaptive Feedback and Dynamic Knowledge
From Hype to Reality: Review of Current AI Practices at Wix / Olga Atzmon & Olha Shainoha
A reality check on building LLM-based systems at scale - exposing gaps, challenges, and best practices beyond the GenAI hype:
The Art Behind Better AI: 46% Faster & 23× Cheaper / Idan Dagan
Why context engineering matters more than prompt engineering - and how a few structural changes transformed performance, cost, and accuracy. The Art Behind Better AI: How We Achieved a 46% Speed Boost and 23× Cost Reduction
Advancing Enterprise AI: Democratizing RAG Evaluation
In 2025 we also introduced RAGXplain and WixQA - practical tools for diagnosing, debugging, and improving real-world RAG systems. Read here: Advancing Enterprise AI - How Wix is Democratizing RAG Evaluation.
Words Matter: How Prompting Shapes Accuracy, Speed, and Cost / Yossi Goldstein
A practical benchmark showing how small prompt changes can swing accuracy and latency dramatically - and how to tune prompts for the metric you actually care about. Read here
A 9-Step Guide to Building an AI Agent You Can Trust / Omer Dodi
A clear 9-step checklist for building reliable agents - from defining tasks and choosing models to evaluation criteria and iterative improvement. Read here
Vision, Architecture & the Future of Engineering
Here's the big picture - how modern engineering is evolving, and what it takes to stay ahead.
The Future of Web Frameworks: A Look at Emerging Trends / Yoav Abrahami
Web frameworks are at a tipping point. Performance, security, accessibility, regulation - and now AI - are redefining what frameworks must handle by default. Yoav Abrahami explores what's changing, why classic assumptions no longer hold, and what the next generation of frameworks must get right. Read The Future of Web Frameworks: A Look at Emerging Trends
From Chaos to Control: Rebuilding Reliability in a World of Microservices / Yoav Abrahami
This battle-tested playbook traces Wix's journey from a fragile monolith to a reliability-first microservices architecture - including the "Split by SLO" pattern that still guides how we build today. Download it here: From Chaos to Control: How We Rebuilt Reliability in a World of Microservices (Wix Engineering’s Battle-Tested Playbook)
Data Discovery, Search & Knowledge at Scale
When thousands of teams and data sources collide - discovery becomes the real challenge.
Solving Data Discovery at Scale with RAG & Multi-Agent Systems / Yael Rafalovich
How we built "Anna", our intelligent assistant that helps teams find the right data fast - even in a decentralized, domain-driven environment. Read here:
The Art of Secure Search: Mastering PII in Vespa / Anton Kolhun and Gregory Bondar
How we enabled full-text search over encrypted PII data without compromising privacy - and what it took to make it production-safe: The Art of Secure Search - How Wix Mastered PII Data in Vespa Search Engine.
Platform Engineering, Dev Experience & Developer Productivity
Speed doesn’t scale without platforms designed as products.
Code at AI Speed: Fixing the Real Bottleneck / Zachi Nachshon
As AI speeds up code generation, the real bottleneck is building and managing code at scale. At Wix, 30M+ lines across 60 repos made that clear. "From 60 Repos to One: How Wix Tackled Monorepo Migration" (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) shows how moving to a single 22GB monorepo unlocked faster builds, clearer ownership, and AI-ready workflows.
You can also watch Zachi's talk as part of Wix Engineering conference:
If You Think Platform Engineering Is Just DevOps, You’re Already Behind / Ben Chen
Why platform engineering is a business capability - not a tooling upgrade - and how Wix treats its internal platform as a product. Read
Developer Platform: Build & Ownership / Tomer Pilossof and Ethan Pogrebizsky
How Wix built a self-service developer platform while embracing the principle: "You build it, you own it". Watch this deep dive talk:
We Added Chaos to Our CI/CD Pipelines - It Made Everything More Stable / Itai Schuftan
How Wix brings AI into CI/CD (logs, triage, migrations) to reduce noise and make pipelines feel more stable, without letting AI touch deterministic deploy decisions. Read here
Distributing Context Across Repositories / Ran Yitzhaki
How sharing structured rules and context across repositories makes AI coding assistants dramatically more effective - and how teams can scale that context using Cursor rules and shared tooling. Watch:
50× Faster Integration Testing / Natan Silnitsky
How in-memory integration testing and hexagonal architecture transformed reliability, speed, and developer happiness? Read here
From 2 Weeks to 2 Seconds: Elevating Mobile Releases by Streamlining Bundling / Yoav Tsook
How breaking a massive mobile app into pre-built package bundles cut build times by over 80%, unlocked local development, and finally made safe code push possible:
Creating a Smart GitHub Code Search MCP from Scratch / Guy Bary
How building a custom MCP server enabled deep, AI-powered code search across repositories, docs, PRs, and commits - turning raw codebases into rich, queryable context for AI tools. Where it fits:
On the Way to Perfection: How to Make API Changes Fast and Safely / Elena Kravchenko
How to evolve internal APIs safely without breaking clients - and why "just deprecate it" is rarely enough in real systems:
Data Platforms, Spark & Cost Efficiency at Massive Scale
We believe that scale without cost control isn't real scale...
How Wix Cut 50% of Its Data Platform Costs / Valery Frolov
A two-part deep dive into cost visibility, attribution, and optimization across a massive multi-cloud data platform. Part 1, Part 2
PlatySpark: Building Spark-as-a-Service / Almog Gelber
Why off-the-shelf tools weren’t enough - and what it really takes to run 5,000+ Spark jobs a day reliably. (Part 1, Part 2):
Migrating 5,000+ Spark Jobs to EMR on EKS / Almog Gelber
A near-transparent migration that cut costs by 50% and reduced spin-up times dramatically. Read this article How Wix Slashed Spark Costs by 50% and Migrated 5,000+ Daily Workflows from EMR to EMR on EKS to know how.
Infrastructure, Performance & Reliability
Lessons From Overcoming TimeCapsule Performance Challenges / Dmytro Kostiuchenko
A real-world performance journey driven by incidents and alerts - covering autoscaling, Kafka tuning, and practical techniques for operating high-throughput systems under pressure:
Engineering Resilience at Scale / Ben Chen
2025 reminded us how fragile the internet still is. The global Cloudflare outage showed what happens when a single critical player fails. At Wix, we've been building for exactly these moments - with Production State as a single source of truth for system health, and Traffic Light enabling zero-downtime traffic shifts across data centers.
The lesson is clear: Resilience isn't a feature. It's a prerequisite. And if you're not designing for failure, you're not designing at all - read more here: Engineering Resilience: Behind the Scenes of Wix's Global Platform
Kafka at Scale: Cutting Costs by 30% / Noam Berman
How a push-based consumer proxy reduced redundant reads and eased Kafka cluster load: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough - How Wix Cut Kafka Costs by 30% with a Push-Based Consumer Proxy
Wix Media Platform: The Engine Behind Your Media / Tomer Salton and Eli Ben-David
How Wix serves images and video at massive scale - 250M+ sites, 6B+ requests/day - and why fast media delivery is deep platform engineering. Watch:
40% Faster Interaction with React Selective Hydration / Gil Eckstein
How React 18’s Suspense enabled faster interactivity without rewrites or new frameworks - 40% Faster Interaction. Read this post to learn
The Future of React: What’s New, What’s Next, and What Matters for Us / Hadar Grossman
What React 18 and 19 really change in production - from Suspense and concurrency to the new React compiler, and their impact on performance at scale. Watch:
Revolutionizing Kafka: Messaging at Scale / Or Ben Ari
How Wix replaced client-side Kafka consumers with a centralized gRPC-based proxy - simplifying development, improving scalability, and cutting messaging costs at scale. Watch:
Engineering Culture, Guilds & Communities
Building the Guild Energy Wheel: Engagement in Motion - Aviva Peisach
A behind-the-scenes look at how engineering guilds scale engagement, collaboration, and culture - and how interconnected "energy wheels" power long-term organizational impact:
Wix Engineering Conference: AI, Platform Engineering & Scaling
A full-day internal conference bringing together real-world lessons from across Wix - from AI systems and platform engineering to performance, reliability, culture, and leadership at scale. Here's our best engineering highlights and insights. You can also watch this cool clip about our unique event:
Engineering Craft & Unexpected Lessons
Keep Your Users Close and Your Bugs Closer / Evelyn Moadi
How deep exposure to user feedback and support workflows leads to better debugging, stronger system understanding, and developers who deliver impact beyond writing code:
Pinpointing Pain Points in Your Code: Effective Value-Driven Refactoring / Asaf Korem
How identifying code "hot-spots" - areas with frequent changes - helps focus refactoring efforts where they deliver the highest value, using simple rules and lightweight tools:
Fixing 2,000 Code Samples with AI Automation / Adam Friedmann
How documentation teams used AI to eliminate weeks of manual work: From Manual Nightmare to AI Automation - Fixing 2,000 Code Samples
Team Lead vs. Tech Debt / Itay Friedman
How team leads can turn technical debt from a burden into leverage - with practical frameworks, prioritization tactics, and real-world trade-offs from Wix Engineering. Watch:
Taming Text in MySQL: When an Emoji Breaks Production / Simonas Viliunas
A deep dive into Unicode, collations, and how tiny details can cause massive failures: Taming Text in MySQL - How a Simple Emoji Uncovered a Complex Collation Problem
Where Do Dev Terms Come From? / Yonatan Mevorach
A fast, entertaining deep dive into the surprising origins of everyday software engineering terms - and how concepts from other engineering disciplines shaped the language we use daily.
SQLing Your Cloud with Steampipe
Query cloud infrastructure like a database - and stop drowning in scripts and dashboards: Have You Ever Tried SQLing Your Cloud? The Power of Steampipe
Oh, One More Thing
Introducing Wix Engineering GPT
This year we also shared our new AI assistant for exploring Wix Engineering content, culture, roles, and open-source work. Talk to us here
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