Wealthsimple is an online financial institution helping over 3 million Canadians achieve financial freedom. They offer no-commission trading, high-interest chequing accounts, managed investing, and low-cost crypto trading, managing over $50 billion in assets. Headquartered in Toronto, their technical team is 400-strong and operates with a builder-first, client-obsessed mindset.
“We are biased toward action. We move fast and ship new products quickly, but we also prioritize platform reliability. Automated testing and tooling are key to catching issues early.” Tyler Marien · Senior Software Developer, Wealthsimple
Wealthsimple’s developers needed to test code changes in production-like environments. The old approach of branch deployments to a shared staging environment was breaking down. It caused instability and made debugging slow and painful due to cross-contamination between services.
Staging had to be “booked” by developers, turning it into a bottleneck. One team’s test could break another’s workflow. The system didn’t scale with the org’s size or engineering velocity.
As Tyler described it, “We had developers deploying unapproved code into staging just to test. That meant when bugs showed up, we couldn’t tell what broke what.”
Signadot solved multiple problems in one go: it gave Wealthsimple isolated, production-like sandboxes, both local and remote, without the staging headache.
Other vendors tackled one part of the problem. Signadot handled the full lifecycle. They did consider building in-house, but Signadot’s fast setup and API-first approach won out.
As Tyler put it, “Signadot let us move quickly without hiring a team to build and maintain infrastructure. It solved problems end-to-end.”
Setting up the Signadot operator was quick. Wealthsimple wrapped Signadot into their internal tooling, an in-house CLI and service that calls Signadot APIs. This gave developers a simple, reliable way to spin up sandboxes without config files or context switching.
They also extended the routing logic into their mobile dev tools, letting testers hit the right sandbox environments directly from the app.
Wealthsimple built a Backstage plugin that connects their CLI, Kubernetes, and the Signadot API. Developers use the CLI to select services, branches, and commits—Backstage fetches the required metadata, and Signadot spins up the sandbox. The process is fast, fully integrated, and requires no config files or manual setup.
Before adopting Signadot, deploying to staging was the only way to test across services. That came with risk, delay, and friction.
“Creating a sandbox is extremely fast, it works every time, lets me test what I’m building quickly, and move on. This is awesome.” Tyler Marien · Senior Software Developer, Wealthsimple
Now, Signadot is fully baked into the dev workflow. Internal tooling handles the setup, and routing keys ensure traffic lands in the right sandbox. Developers use the same API tools (Postman, Insomnia) and workflows they always did, just with better isolation and speed.
50% fewer staging deployments. Weekly deployments to staging dropped from 260 to 134. Staging became more stable, developers stopped blocking each other, and time-to-feedback for code changes became faster and more reliable.
Since adopting Signadot:
These results not only reduced load on staging, but also boosted confidence in automated and E2E testing workflows.
As Tyler noted, “The part I think most people enjoy is the speed. Spin up a sandbox, test with the same tools, no friction.”
Wealthsimple plans to expand sandbox testing to cover asynchronous job flows, including workloads that run through Sidekiq, Redis, AWS SQS/SNS, Kafka, and Temporal. Solving for async is the next evolution of their shift-left testing strategy.
As Tyler explained, “We’ve proven this works amazingly well for service testing. Now we want to expand it to async workloads to complete the picture.”
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