How RB Global's new platform team took ownership in three months, not six

RB Global runs some of the world's largest marketplaces for commercial assets and vehicles, connecting buyers and sellers of heavy equipment, trucks, and more across the globe. Behind that marketplace is a platform engineering team that gives RB Global's developers the tools and infrastructure to ship.

When Prasad Tolukkanam, Director of Cloud and Platform Engineering, and Pedro Fernandez, who runs the delivery infrastructure platforms team, joined RB Global, they inherited a high-stakes project: take a platform built and operated by an outside consultancy and bring it fully in-house. To do it, they leaned on Unblocked as their context engine, the layer that turns scattered institutional knowledge into instant, trusted answers.

The challenge: taking over a platform you didn't build#

Bringing the platform in-house meant understanding a system someone else had designed. Documentation existed on Confluence, but the critical context, how the tools were wired together and why, was spread across GitHub, CircleCI pipelines, Jira, and years of Slack history. "Bringing this in-house means understanding what they have set up," Prasad said. "Unblocked gave us an easy way to get any question answered on how these tools are integrated into the ecosystem."

There was no shortcut through people, either. The team is globally distributed across the United States, Canada, and Finland, so the usual fallback of walking over to the person who knows was rarely an option.

The context engine: institutional knowledge, on demand#

Unblocked connected to the systems where RB Global's knowledge already lived and turned them into answers. By analyzing GitHub code, CircleCI pipelines, Confluence, Jira, and Slack channels, it could go back through history and surface support incidents and questions from the past, so the new team could get up to speed fast.

Because it reads the team's real history, Unblocked also surfaces what has already been solved. "It looks at our past Slack history, so it has a way to tell you: this has already happened, so please do this," Prasad said. For Pedro, the fact that it was tuned to their world was the point. "Having an AI that's customized for the company was extremely helpful," he said.

"We were able to go back in history and look at support incidents and questions from the past. That really helped the new team support the 200-plus developers we have."

Pedro Fernandez — Delivery Infrastructure Platforms, RB Global

The result: full ownership in three months, not six#

The payoff was speed. The team absorbed and transitioned the entire platform tool set, end to end, and took full ownership in three months, with Unblocked playing a critical role in the handover onto RB engineering.

That is roughly half the time the transition was expected to take, done by a brand-new team learning the platform as they went.

"The RB Global engineers did this in record time, three months. It would have taken at least six months, or even more. Unblocked played a critical role."

Prasad Tolukkanam — Director of Cloud and Platform Engineering, RB Global

An always-on support arm#

Once the transition was done, Unblocked stayed on as part of how the platform team supports RB Global's developers. The alternative would be dedicating engineers to watch Slack and answer questions all day, each of whom would need to carry all the tribal knowledge themselves. Instead, Unblocked fields those questions, which frees the team to build and release features and gives RB Global's 200-plus developers a seamless way to get answers in Slack without interrupting anyone.

"I have a support team without having a support team. It's an extension of my platform engineering as a support arm."

Prasad Tolukkanam — Director of Cloud and Platform Engineering, RB Global

Tailored to RB Global, not generic AI#

The team draws a sharp line between Unblocked and general-purpose AI. "Unblocked is more enterprise-focused, catered to the way we have developed things," Prasad said. "We have Copilot, but that is specific to me, not to everything in the ecosystem." Pedro put it simply: Unblocked looks inside the company first. "It links all the things we have, the code, the GitHub repos, the documentation, and those recommendations are valuable because they are tailored for the company."

Newer capabilities are landing well, too. "The feedback on code review has been extremely great," Pedro said. "It helps you become a better developer and push out your projects faster."

For a small team supporting hundreds of developers across four time zones, Unblocked turned a six-month transition into a three-month one, and it became the always-on knowledge layer underneath everything the team ships.

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can be the context engine for your engineers.