The Challenge

A Series A SaaS company had just closed their funding round and needed to ship a major product milestone before their next board meeting — 90 days away. Their internal team of 3 engineers was strong but simply couldn’t cover the surface area: frontend features, backend API development, and a QA process that was still entirely manual.

They’d tried hiring through traditional channels. After two months, they had one accepted offer and two candidates still “thinking about it.” The clock was ticking.

What We Did

We started with a 45-minute call to understand their stack (React, Node.js, PostgreSQL), their working style (async-first, two-week sprints), and what “good” looked like for their team. Within 72 hours, we sent shortlists for 3 roles: senior frontend, senior backend, and QA lead.

Over the next two weeks, we placed 9 engineers total — 4 frontend developers, 3 backend developers, and 2 QA specialists. Each one went through our technical assessment and communication evaluation before the client saw their profile.

The engineers joined the client’s Slack, attended their standups, and pushed code to their repos from day one. No separate project management layer. No “offshore team” feel. They operated as direct extensions of the existing team.

The Approach

We staggered the onboarding deliberately. The first 3 engineers (1 frontend, 1 backend, 1 QA) started in week one to establish patterns — coding standards, PR review process, deployment workflow. The remaining 6 joined over weeks two and three, onboarding faster because the patterns were already set.

We assigned a dedicated account manager who checked in weekly with the client’s CTO — not to manage the engineers, but to catch any friction early. One backend developer wasn’t the right fit for their async communication style. We replaced them within a week.

The Result

The product milestone shipped on time. The board meeting went well. Three of the augmented engineers converted to long-term placements and are still with the team today. The client has since expanded the engagement twice — once for a mobile app build, once for a data pipeline project.