A growing EU-based AI data analytics startup reached out to us with a clear challenge: they got their first sale and needed to scale the product immediately, but without a recruiter in-house and pre-vetted developers ready to go, it was slightly challenging to hire top-tier experts fast. And considering that it’s an SME without funding, it was essential to save hiring costs and cut operational expenses, so staff augmentation looked like a perfect solution.

Their key pain points:

• Time-to-market was slowing down due to limited backend and DevOps support
• Their CI/CD pipeline was slow and often unreliable
• They had feature ideas but lacked the frontend capacity to build them
• Infrastructure was mostly manual and hard to scale

They used a modern stack — Python for backend and ML components, React for frontend, and AWS for hosting — but lacked the hands to maintain, improve, and scale it.

They wanted 2 Senior Developers who could:

• Act as embedded team members, proactive guys with strong soft skills and cultural fit
• Own features end-to-end
• Help clean up and stabilize the infrastructure
• Suggest improvements, not just follow orders, think outside the box

• Developers with the same business mindset — those who understand things without needing many words 

They had tried some freelancers before, but what they needed was committed, senior-level support. We sourced quite a few candidates, and from our side one(!) Senior Python/React with DevOps skills, who has the necessary qualifications to manage their requests and who could combine expertise of 2 separate experts.