Boosting global billing operations using AWS with Delivery Hero

Pandora Billing, a technology department within Delivery Hero, manages billing operations for three brands: Yemeksepeti, foodpanda, and foodora. This team handles the complete order-to-cash process in 18 countries in Europe and South East Asia, which have some of the most critical and complex legal and tax regulations.

Delivery Hero relies on hundreds of thousands of vendors who fulfill customer orders, so timely and accurate payments are crucial for maintaining these essential business relationships. As the company expanded, Pandora Billing’s system grew increasingly complex, with new components added for each market entry. This system, which used 12 different services to process each transaction, became challenging to scale or enhance. It sometimes took days to identify and resolve the root causes of issues with payments of customer receipts.

To solve these challenges, the team recognized that the use of managed services could remove much of the operational burden while providing built-in reliability features. “One of our goals was to use something out of the box instead of building something,” says Rafael Rodriguez, senior manager at Delivery Hero.

Pandora Billing wanted to select the right service for its billing solution and found that serverless AWS services—which offer high scalability, performance, and reliability—could meet its requirements. “We conducted proofs of concept for five different tools on the market,” says Rodriguez. “We also considered which cloud provider would offer strong support and a smooth learning curve and would perfectly fit our goals. AWS was a top choice for us."

After completing the proof of concept, Pandora Billing built a serverless billing solution on AWS Step Functions, a visual-workflow service, and first implemented it in Taiwan—one of its most complex markets.

Using a controlled canary release strategy with weighted aliases, the team successfully rolled out the solution across 18 countries within 4 months and maintained consistent service quality.

With the new architecture, the team created a streamlined, orchestrated workflow, reducing maintenance overhead. AWS Step Functions served as the central coordinator, providing a visual interface to design, deploy, and monitor each step of the billing process. Each transaction now follows a clearly defined path that includes validation, processing, and communication steps, with built-in error handling at every stage.

Multiple AWS services work in tandem within this workflow. For example, to activate specific billing calculations and validations, the team uses functions on AWS Lambda, which lets users run code without thinking about servers or clusters. The team also uses Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a cloud-based email service provider, to deliver receipts and invoices directly to customers.

“Using AWS, we’ve streamlined our processes and enhanced both visibility and resilience,” says Martins Olajide, staff software engineer at Delivery Hero. “We’ve transitioned from disparate services to functions that perform specific tasks and return responses, all managed by a central orchestrator. Everything still happens, but in a much more cohesive manner where we have full control.”

Using the visual workflow that AWS Step Functions provides, Pandora Billing upgraded its troubleshooting capabilities. Now, the team can better identify exactly where an issue occurs in the process. This way, Pandora Billing reduced discovery time from 1 day to 30 minutes. The solution also boosted reliability, decreasing billing workflow failures by 99 percent. Product teams can more clearly visualize complete billing flows in each country, which makes fragmented insights much more accessible and actionable for everyone across the organization.

The system’s self-healing capabilities removed the need for manual reprocessing, giving engineers back valuable time. Engineers can collaborate and troubleshoot quickly, and the company can onboard new engineers in 2 days instead of 2 weeks. These enhancements help strengthen technical and business stakeholder relationships.

Pandora Billing also decreased its infrastructure costs by 50 percent through simplifying and optimizing its architecture, and the team expects these savings to reach up to 90 percent. Additionally, the team has accelerated its time to market by more than 80 percent. “We’ve reduced the development time of major features from 2–3 weeks to 3 days,” says Rodriguez. “For simpler features, it’s now 1 day instead of 5 days or more with the previous architecture.”

With its new Pandora Billing solution, Delivery Hero’s vendors now receive more-reliable, timely payments without the previous delays that system failures caused. Customers receive correctly formatted receipts without duplications or errors. Finance teams have gained great clarity into billing operations across all markets. Building on this success, the team sees potential to apply serverless approaches to other use cases within Pandora Billing at Delivery Hero.