Coaching and tracking app for amateur athletes

The company, a growth-stage startup in SportTech headquartered in United States, needed to solve this challenge: “coaching and tracking app for amateur athletes”. The obstacle wasn't so much business domain knowledge —always valuable— as finding profiles with demonstrable experience in the project's specific technology stack; in fact, they had already tried hiring for it without success, with the added expense and lost opportunity that entailed. They also carried methodological management problems: immature agile rituals, difficulty planning sprints realistically, and little discipline in tracking work. The context was one of accelerated growth, with investment already committed and high expectations from leadership and, where applicable, investors.

Squad Challenge built 3 challenges, one per position, based on the project's real business case, analyzing an average of 5 candidates per position (15 in total) and delivering the final shortlist in 10 days.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, the AOR-based hiring of the candidates validated through Squad Challenge, handling contract generation adapted to each developer's country of origin, data validation, and the onboarding process.

In total, the squad was made up of 3 profiles (frontend developer, ML engineer, DevOps/SRE), working on a stack of Node.js (Fastify), React + Next.js, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, GitLab, AWS. The company had no consolidated in-house technical team, so the professionals proposed by Squadmakers, brought on under the AOR model, operated as the product's engineering core from day one. The engagement ran for 17 months in total.