Technological Partnership – Building & Reshaping the Engineering Function

Client:

LATAM Gateway is a Brazilian FinTech scale-up. Specialising in creating payment 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 (LG) struggled greatly to grow and structure efficiently their engineering team, in order to scale its product and 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 and in fact 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 meeting new clients, onboarding them and creating the strategic product roadmap and has become in an impossible position managing all the varied work streams.

Solution:

Latam Gataway 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, in managing the whole product development.

In the process, we have found the right fit for 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 daily.

Additionally, we have gradually built a Dedicated Team of 4 including a Quality Assurance engineer all working remotely from Sofia – our main location in Bulgaria. In order to provide maximum delivery capability and agility to the client and increase its product iterations and releases.

Furthermore, Latam Gateway has instructed eLando AD to further enlarge the Dedicated Team with 3+ additional senior roles including a Security Architect and DevOps engineer growing the team substantially and firmly in line with the client`s fast-moving business landscape.

Technical Context:

LATAM Gateway provides two services: Latam Gateway and ApoloPAG.

Latam Gateway is a payment gateway providing integration for local Brazilian payment methods such as PIX and Boleto but also with worldwide payment providers such as PayPal. Latam Gateway supports only pay-in functionality, meaning that money transfers are one-directional, and customers can only deposit money through the given payment methods.

ApoloPAG is a payment gateway providing the same pay-in functionality as Latam Gateway, but it also provides pay-out functionality. This allows our partners to wire money back to the customers.

Both systems are monolithic Ruby on Rails projects. Each one of them owns a separate database but is split into multiple servers. Initially, the servers were hosted in Heroku, but we are moving to a microservice architecture deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). On the cloud, we are planning to use state-of-the-art technologies and methods such as pub/sub, serverless (lambda) functions, and distributed tracing.

The biggest challenge for LATAM since their partnership with eLando was an integration with the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world – Binance. All payments in Brazil to Binance now happen through Latam Gateway and all transfers from Binance to their customers happen through ApoloPAG. The integration had to be done on short notice. We had about three weeks to complete all tasks and requests. The load from Binance is significant thus a new environment for them was created.

All projects have CI/CD workflows based on GitHub actions which automatically provide testing and deployment to the working environments.

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.

Reference

eLando has been extremely professional in our engagement with them. They have helped us enormously to build and enlarge our Technology Delivery function, providing excellent specialists.

Furthermore, eLando has been instrumental in providing us with technological capabilities to win big clients and grow and enlarge our business exponentially.

I highly recommend eLando as a very trustworthy, reliable, and caring Technology Partner. This could help any company to create new digital products and services, lead digital transformation efforts and ultimately help it grow, innovate, and succeed.

Christian Ribeiro

CEO Latam Gateway