Dev team cuts Quarkus CI pipeline time from 11 minutes to 5 minutes without paid tools

A development team running a Quarkus monorepo on GitHub Actions free-tier runners reduced their CI pipeline duration from 9–11 minutes down to approximately 5 minutes 20 seconds. The gains were achieved without self-hosted runners, larger GitHub runners, or paid caching services. Investigation revealed the bottleneck was not dependency downloads or Maven compilation, but duplicated Quarkus work such as repeated augmentation, redundant application boots, and unnecessary infrastructure startup. The team deliberately avoided splitting integration tests into per-service matrix jobs, as doing so would have multiplied fixed setup costs across each parallel cell. Instead, optimisations focused on eliminating duplicated work within existing jobs while keeping the overall job count small.