How Seesaw Trusts Bacca to Free Engineers from Operational Toil and Keep 20 Million Students Learning Uninterrupted

Executive Summary

Seesaw serves as the digital backbone for 70% of U.S. elementary schools. A lean engineering team manages over 30 interconnected micro-services to support 20 million students and teachers. These users rely on the platform to complete lessons without a single disruption. The team chooses Bacca to stabilize their high-scale infrastructure and eliminate operational toil.

Bacca operates as a senior AI site reliability engineer. It isolates cascading signals and predicts root causes with 95%+ accuracy. The time to find a root cause drops from one hour to five minutes. Manual fire-fighting stops. Engineers reclaim their sanity during on-call rotations. They sleep better. The team focuses entirely on building better educational tools for children.

About Seesaw

Seesaw Learning is the essential infrastructure for 70% of classrooms across the United States. The platform connects 20 million students, teachers, and families. It helps early learners grasp basic educational concepts long before they know how to read or write. Operating at this massive scale requires an absolute guarantee of stability. A system crash in the middle of the school day stops education dead in its tracks. Seesaw ensures 20 million people can teach and learn without a single interruption.

“Seesaw Learning is an edtech app which is used by 70% of elementary schools in the US, and we're fairly popular in the UK and Australia as well. It helps kids learn before they learn how to read and write... teaching them how to learn is the focus.” - Kosh Thirumalai, Director of Engineering, Seesaw

Extreme traffic surges hit the application regularly. The lean engineering team maintains perfect stability during the big Northern Hemisphere back-to-school waves from August through October. The Southern Hemisphere cycles follow right after in February. Tens of millions of users log on during these exact peaks and expect flawless execution.

The Challenge for the Platform Team

Seesaw hit major operational hurdles during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to remote learning drove a 5x surge in usage virtually overnight. The engineering team deployed custom features in a hurry to keep classrooms online. This explosive growth created technical debt and immense operational toil.

Standard talent turnover erased deep system knowledge. A core group of engineers stabilized the platform during the initial usage spikes. They eventually moved on to new roles. Documentation lived in scattered Google Docs and Sheets. New hires had to figure out undocumented systems on the fly.

Seesaw fell into an observability trap. They invested in Datadog to regain visibility over their systems. Consolidating metrics under one roof created a completely new crisis of alert fatigue. A single failure across 30 microservices triggered a cascading wall of alarms. Engineers drowned in telemetry noise.

“We learned of our new problem: Boy, there's sure a lot of telemetry signals all mixed together in this one place... Now how do you extract signal from all the noise you just created? Digesting huge amounts of information is something that robots can be pretty good at.” - Dan Everson, Engineering Manager, Platform & Systems, Seesaw

Maintaining perfect uptime placed a heavy burden on the lean engineering organization. Feature-facing engineers often lacked the deep system context required to diagnose complex infrastructure alerts. Some team members spent up to 20% of their time dealing with on-call issues. This manual triaging and debugging skyrocketed stress levels and created severe burnout.

Why Bacca Was the Perfect Fit

Seesaw’s leadership knew they could not just hire their way out of a knowledge-digestion problem. No human holds the intricate interactions of 30 microservices in their head. A person cannot instantly zero in on a root cause during a 3:00 AM incident.

They needed an automated system to act as a senior SRE. The team evaluated legacy observability tools for automation and found those solutions fell short. Seesaw chose Bacca. The deciding factor went beyond basic AI features. Bacca’s founder actually sat in the SRE seat before. Eric Lu built a product designed to absorb the miserable parts of an engineer's job.

Seesaw developers now use AI coding assistants like Cursor and Codex to ship features faster. System interactions under the hood become far more obscure as a result. Bacca tracks context and provides a safety net for this high-velocity development cycle. The platform bridges the widening gap between rapid code generation and absolute system stability.

Inside an Incident: Reducing the Hops from Alert to Mitigation

Gathering context is the hardest part of an engineer's job when an alert triggers. Fixing the code is the easy part. Bacca instantly bridges the gap between the application layer and the infrastructure layer.

A recent spike in admin logins illustrates this perfectly. Seesaw closely monitors elevated login attempts from administrators. These highly sensitive personas include school district officials capable of modifying student rosters.

On-call engineers historically scrubbed logs manually to check for single-IP patterns and verify data center traffic. They also had to verify if secondary IP-blocking systems functioned properly. This manual investigation created a tedious and exhausting mental checklist.

Bacca natively understands the environment and connects the dots. The tool drops a packaged summary into Slack the second an alert fires. It confirms the logins originated from a single IP. It verifies the IP-blocker is successfully sending heartbeat logs. The summary then presents direct links to the exact logs the engineer needs.

Eliminating manual investigation hops allows engineers to skip the context-gathering phase. They move straight into confident mitigation.

Beyond the Alert: Bacca’s Compounding Value

Deploying Bacca fundamentally changed how Seesaw engineers experience on-call rotations. Kosh Thirumalai outlines three distinct ways the platform protects the team.

1. Bacca isolates signals immediately during cascading failures. Catastrophic failures cause dozens of alarms to scream simultaneously across microservices. Bacca jumps directly into the Slack incident channel to point engineers to the four or five signals that actually matter. The team stops spreading themselves too thin. Morale goes up.
2. The system acts as the organization's long-term memory. Bacca tracks alert frequency and remembers exactly how the team solved issues in the past. It drops specific context into the channel. It notes when an issue has happened multiple times and predicts the root cause based on past Slack discussions. Leadership uses this exact data to prioritize fixing noisy technical debt.
3. Bacca matures alongside the team. The tool reads post-mortem documentation and past incident artifacts. This data allows it to actively predict root causes instead of just correlating signals. It acts exactly like a senior engineer.

Unlocking Engineering Potential

Seesaw stopped asking their engineers to act as human data-parsers. The team focuses entirely on building better educational tools for children. Buying an AI SRE operates as an investment in company culture. It protects team morale and ensures 20 million users can learn uninterrupted.

“Think of an AI SRE as an investment in how much more time you can give back to your team... It's a fantastic investment in both your operations culture, your people culture, and your company's brand image.” - Kosh Thirumalai, Director of Engineering, Seesaw

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Let us show you how Bacca can help your team. Book a demo with us to learn more. We’d love to help you. https://www.bacca.ai/