Case Study: From Zero to Shipping in 10 Days — A 72-Hour Placement Story
The Situation
A Series A fintech startup based in London had closed a $4.2M round and needed to move fast. Their existing engineering team was two people: a CTO and a single senior backend developer. The product roadmap required shipping three major features before a regulatory deadline 14 weeks away. With the current team, they could deliver one.
They'd already spent five weeks trying to hire locally. Two offers had been declined — one candidate took a competing offer, the other wanted a salary above budget. The recruitment agency pipeline had dried up. The clock was running.
What They Needed
- Two senior backend engineers with Python and FastAPI experience
- One senior frontend engineer with React and TypeScript proficiency
- All three needed to integrate into the existing codebase and work under the CTO's direction
- Full timezone overlap with London working hours (GMT/BST)
- Start date: as soon as possible
What Happened
Day 1 — Technical discovery call.
The CTO spent 45 minutes with a Conectia technical partner. They mapped the current architecture (Python microservices on AWS, PostgreSQL, React frontend with TypeScript), the three features that needed to ship, the team dynamics (small team, fast-moving, minimal process overhead), and the specific technical requirements for each role.
Day 3 — Shortlist delivered.
Conectia delivered five CTO-vetted profiles: three backend candidates and two frontend candidates. Each profile included a detailed technical assessment covering architecture reasoning, code quality evaluation, AI tool proficiency scores, and communication assessment results. The CTO reviewed profiles that evening.
Day 4–5 — Fit conversations.
The CTO conducted 30-minute conversations with four of the five candidates. No additional technical screening — the Conectia vetting covered that. The conversations focused on team fit: how they handle ambiguity, their experience with regulated industries, their comfort with a small-team environment where everyone wears multiple hats.
Day 5 — Decisions made.
Two backend engineers (both based in Peru, 7 and 9 years of experience) and one frontend engineer (Colombia, 8 years of experience). Contracts signed same day.
Day 8 — Engineers started.
All three had development environments running by end of day one. The CTO had prepared a lightweight onboarding document: architecture diagram, deployment pipeline overview, coding conventions, and a first task for each engineer.
Day 10 — First PRs merged.
The first backend engineer shipped a database migration and API endpoint. The frontend engineer completed a UI component that had been blocked for three weeks. The second backend engineer opened a PR for a payment integration module.
The Outcome
Features delivered on time. All three features shipped before the regulatory deadline, with two weeks to spare for testing and compliance review. The 14-week timeline that seemed impossible with a two-person team became comfortable with five.
Engineering velocity tripled. Weekly PR volume went from 4–5 (two-person team) to 14–18 (five-person team). The CTO reported spending less time on code review per PR because the nearshore engineers' code quality matched or exceeded the existing team's standards.
Cost savings. The three nearshore engineers cost approximately 55% of what equivalent London-based hires would have cost — and they started seven weeks sooner than local hiring could have delivered.
Retention. All three engineers remained on the engagement for 12+ months. One was later promoted to tech lead for a new product vertical.
What Made It Work
Speed without shortcuts. The 72-hour shortlist wasn't fast because we skipped steps — it was fast because the vetting was already done. The engineers in our network have already passed the full five-pillar assessment. Matching them to this specific engagement was a matter of filtering, not screening.
The CTO talked to a CTO. The discovery call produced actionable selection criteria because it was a technical conversation, not a requirements-gathering exercise. A recruiter would have asked about years of experience and keywords. A CTO asked about architectural trade-offs and team dynamics.
Prepared onboarding. The client invested a few hours before the engineers started: an architecture document, dev environment guide, and pre-selected first tasks. That preparation converted into productive days instead of wasted ones.
Clear ownership. The CTO managed the team directly. The nearshore engineers weren't treated as external resources — they were team members with commit access, standup participation, and direct Slack communication. No intermediary, no separate project management layer.
The Numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Time from first call to shortlist | 72 hours |
| Time from shortlist to engineers starting | 5 business days |
| Time to first merged PR | 2 business days after start |
| Weekly PR volume (before) | 4–5 |
| Weekly PR volume (after) | 14–18 |
| Cost savings vs. London hiring | ~55% |
| Features shipped on time | 3/3 |
| Engineer retention after 12 months | 3/3 |
Need to scale your engineering team this month? Talk to a technical partner — CTO-vetted profiles delivered in 72 hours, engineers shipping code within two weeks.
