Mojo is a programming language for heterogenous compute built on top of MLIR and LLVM. Like many other programming languages and compiler systems built this way, the LLVM pipeline is often the bottleneck for compilation time. In this talk, we will share our strategies for wrestling with LLVM and leveraging MLIR passes in our pipeline design to significantly reduce compilation time without sacrificing generated code performance. As a result, we cut time spent in LLVM from 80% to 20% of overall Mojo compilation time.