Northwind gave its on-call engineers their nights back. Orrin takes the first look at every incident, and most nights the fix is waiting, tests green, before anyone has opened a laptop.
- 83%
- of incidents get a first look from Orrin
- 11 min
- median from a page to a pull request, overnight
- 38%
- fewer engineers woken after midnight
Northwind
Route planning for delivery fleets
- Based in
- London
- Engineers
- 140
- Plan
- Team
- Since
- January 2026
Before
Northwind's routing engine plans 1.2 million deliveries a day for grocers and parcel carriers in eleven countries. When something breaks at 2 a.m., a driver somewhere is waiting on a route. The platform team of nine ran a rota that woke someone about four nights a week, usually for an error that took ten minutes to fix and an hour to find.
Priya Raman, who leads the team, had tried runbooks and better alerts. Both helped. Neither changed the fact that the slow part was a person, half awake, reading a stack trace.
“Orrin takes the first look at every incident now. Most nights the pull request is waiting, tests green, before anyone on call has opened their laptop.”
Trying it
Northwind started with one service, the address normaliser, which caused a third of its pages. For the first month Orrin's pull requests went to a channel nobody was paged from, and the team reviewed them in the morning. In that month it opened 46; the team merged 31 unchanged and edited 9.
In the second month they connected PagerDuty. Now Orrin takes the first look when the page fires, and the engineer on call gets the page with the run attached.
Now
Orrin covers all 23 of Northwind's services. The engineer on call is still paged for anything a customer can see, but the page often arrives with a pull request that can be approved from a phone. Engineers woken after midnight fell by 38% in the first quarter.
The team kept one rule from the trial: Orrin's pull requests are reviewed like anyone else's. It is the first responder, not the last word.