Credit origination platform for a neobank

The company, a growth-stage startup in FinTech headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “credit origination platform for a neobank”. 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. The competitive window was short: a competitor with a similar product was already gaining market share.

Squad Challenge designed 5 challenges, one per position, to evaluate professionals already linked to the client, drawn from its own internal team and outsourcing firms it already worked with, analyzing an average of 5 candidates per position (25 evaluated in total) in 7 days.

The squad was made up of 5 profiles (full-stack developer, mobile developer, data engineer, backend developer, DevOps/SRE) working on a stack of TypeScript, Express.js, Node.js, Python (Django), AWS, and React, sourced from the client and its outsourcing firms. The company had no consolidated in-house technical team, so this squad, already linked to it through outsourcing, operated as the product's engineering core from day one. Since some of these profiles came from outsourcing firms, their turnover was high (around 50%), which led to evaluating 2 additional replacements over the course of the project, reaching a total commitment of 10 months.