8→26
engineers in 9 months
9 days
avg. request to signed offer
~35%
below equivalent US hiring cost
94%
engineer retention over 18 months
The Client
A Series B B2B SaaS company building a project-management and resource-planning platform for professional services firms. Around 120 employees at the start of the engagement, with an 8-person in-house engineering team based in the US, roughly 1,400 paying customer accounts, and fresh funding earmarked for product expansion into enterprise accounts.
The Challenge
The Series B round came with an aggressive product roadmap: an enterprise permissions model, a public API, native mobile apps, and SOC 2-driven infrastructure work — all targeted within a year. The company's own hiring funnel was producing roughly one accepted offer per month, at fully loaded US costs that would have pushed burn well past board-approved levels.
Leadership was clear about what they did not want: a black-box agency delivering features over a wall. They wanted engineers who joined their standups, used their tooling, and stayed. Two previous attempts with staffing vendors had failed on exactly that point — junior candidates presented as seniors, and 40%+ churn within the first year.
What We Did
We ran this as a classic Dillo staff augmentation engagement: the client owned the roadmap and day-to-day management; Dillo owned sourcing, vetting, employment, and retention. Our AI-automated recruiting pipeline screened candidates against the client's actual codebase patterns and interview bar, so the client's engineering managers only ever saw candidates worth their time.
- Staffed three full-stack pods (React front end, Node.js services) of 3–4 senior engineers each, mapped to the client's product squads.
- Added a DevOps pod of two engineers to take Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD work off the core team and drive the SOC 2 infrastructure checklist.
- Built a QA pod of three engineers who introduced Playwright end-to-end coverage and cut the manual regression cycle from three days to hours.
- Kept a warm bench of pre-vetted candidates per role, so backfills and expansions averaged 9 days from request to signed offer.
- Ran quarterly engagement reviews and individual retention check-ins on our side — compensation, growth, and workload — so problems surfaced before resignations did.
Every engineer worked in the client's Slack, Jira and GitHub from day one, on US-overlapping hours. Pricing was the same throughout: transparent salary plus Dillo's low flat margin, visible on every invoice.
The Results
- Engineering grew from 8 to 26 engineers in 9 months — a pace the client's internal recruiting had projected to take nearly three years.
- Total engineering cost landed ~35% below the equivalent US hiring plan, keeping burn within the board-approved envelope.
- The enterprise permissions model and public API both shipped on the original roadmap dates; mobile apps followed one quarter later.
- 94% of Dillo engineers were still on the team 18 months in — higher retention than the client's own US hires over the same period.
- The client has since treated the Dillo pods as a permanent extension of the team, expanding into a data engineering pod in year two.
Figures reflect outcomes reported for this engagement; they are project results, not audited benchmarks.
Tech Stack
Services Used
IT Staff Augmentation — dedicated engineering pods embedded in the client's team, on Dillo's transparent flat-margin pricing.