Cross-border payments engine for a B2B fintech

The company, an established company in FinTech headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “cross-border payments engine for a B2B fintech”. 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. All of this was happening under time pressure, with a market deadline that left no room for error.

Squad Challenge designed several challenges to evaluate the profiles that different outsourcing firms presented to the client. The challenges were built around the business case itself and its technology stack, evaluating more than 30 professionals in 14 days.

The initial squad was made up of 6 profiles (frontend developer, Tech Lead, backend developer, DevOps/SRE, full-stack developer, ML engineer) working on a stack of PostgreSQL, AWS, Kafka, and Python (FastAPI), sourced from the outsourcing firms evaluated. This squad integrated with the company's existing in-house technical team, respecting established processes and priorities. The team's high turnover required evaluating 10 additional professionals over the following 12 months, for a total commitment of 19 months.