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Fintech / Staff augmentation

Scaling a fintech engineering team fast without losing velocity

After a Series B raise, a fintech had product commitments its eight-person engineering team could not deliver, and local hiring for its Go, React and AWS stack would take most of a year. We stood up embedded engineering squads that quadrupled capacity in five months.

ClientSeries-B fintech (confidential)
IndustryFintech / Staff augmentation
What we deliveredDedicated engineering teams, delivery management, knowledge transfer
Scaling a fintech engineering team fast without losing velocity
5 monthsTeam scaled ~4×
On timeEvery roadmap feature delivered
ZeroIncidents attributable to the expansion

01 The challenge

The in-house team was fully loaded and specialised talent was scarce. Investors expected four major features on a fixed roadmap. Bringing in outside engineers risked slowing the core team with onboarding, diluting code quality and creating knowledge that would walk out the door later.

02 What we did

  • Squad-based augmentation: pods of senior engineers with a lead, embedded in the client's process, tooling and stand-ups
  • Two-week onboarding playbook covering architecture, standards, security and domain
  • Shared code ownership with the in-house team — same reviews, same CI, same definition of done
  • Delivery management reporting velocity and risk to leadership weekly
  • Transition plan with documentation and pairing so knowledge stays with the client, and an option to convert engineers to permanent roles

03 The results

  • Engineering capacity scaled from eight to over thirty in five months
  • Sprint velocity multiplied rather than dipped during expansion
  • All four roadmap features delivered on time
  • No production incidents attributable to the expansion; several engineers later converted to permanent hires

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