Quantum simulation platform as a service

The company, a scale-up in DeepTech headquartered in United States, needed to solve this challenge: “quantum simulation platform as a service”. 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 set up 6 challenges, one per position, focused on professionals who already had a relationship with the client —from its own team or from outsourcing firms it worked with—, evaluating an average of 5 candidates per position (30 in total) in 3 days.

The squad was made up of 6 profiles (QA engineer, ML engineer, DevOps/SRE, full-stack developer, backend developer, frontend developer) working on a stack of Python (FastAPI), React, MongoDB, Cassandra, GitHub, Azure, sourced from the client and its outsourcing firms. This squad integrated with the company's existing in-house technical team, respecting established processes and priorities. Since some of these profiles came from outsourcing firms, their turnover was high (around 50%), which led to evaluating 3 additional replacements over the course of the project, reaching a total commitment of 11 months.