Technological Partnership – Building & Reshaping the Engineering Function

Client: 

LATAM Gateway is a Brazilian FinTech scale-up. Specialising in creating payments solutions for the gaming sector across Latin America. The gaming market in the region is growing rapidly and its technology requirements require constant innovation, delivery speed and scalable solutions.

Challenge: 

LATAM Gateway struggled greatly to grow and structure efficiently their engineering team, in order to scale their product, increase its revenue and market share. Engaging with remote freelance engineers across Latin America was initially a workable option but has proven to be a temporary and unscalable solution, once the company needed to speed up its product development.

Furthermore, the company faced the impossible undertaking of creating a coherent team from separated freelancers across borders. LG found it difficult near impossible to hire good Ruby on Rails engineers locally with subject matter expertise in the Payments domain. This slowed down significantly the onboarding of new clients and the further development of the product. 

The CTO was overwhelmed by managing the whole engineering team, alongside with meeting new clients, onboarding them and creating the strategic product roadmap and has become the actual structural bottleneck of the company.

Solution: 

LG realised that it needed a long-term solution to its challenge and contacted eLando AD, looking to find a stable, reliable, and effective Tech Partner. We have successfully engaged with them, providing a senior engineer at the start of the project to learn more about the challenges, work environment and the current set up.

During this initial engagement it became clear that LG needed a distributed Dedicated Team with a highly capable Tech Lead, to address both challenges – the lack of enough skilled software engineers in the region and the CTO`s role, as managing the whole product development. 

We have found the right caliber Tech Lead with specific domain knowledge and management capabilities. He fast became the right hand to the CTO, becoming the Engineering Manager at LG overseeing and managing the software development process operationally on a daily basis.

Furthermore, eLando AD has onboarded a Dedicated Team of 3 additional senior software engineers (taken the team to 5 people) working remotely from Sofia – our main location in Bulgaria, providing maximum delivery capability and agility to the client and increasing its product iterations and releasees.

Result:

After eLando became its strategic Tech Partner, LATAM Gateway has scaled rapidly, onboarding several large new clients, and increasing the speed and velocity of its product development, adding client-led customisations and features, significantly reducing the time & effort of onboarding new clients to the platform and increasing its user base. 

Now, there is operating an effective engineering team, who is managed by our Tech lead, the CTO is back to his strategic engagements charting the future of the product and liaising with important stakeholders and is no longer operationally overseeing the engineering team.