A Swiss provider of secure edge-to-cloud IoT solutions turns to us to grow its team
Four engineers joined a nine-person product team and stayed through three release cycles.
- Product
- IoT platform
- Technologies
- Azure, .NET, C#, React, Angular
- Timeframe
- 2022 – 2026
Holol Alghad engineers strengthened the team of an IoT solution provider that could not hire fast enough locally.
The challenge
Zurich is a seller's market for engineers: established players offer packages a product startup cannot match, so our client kept losing candidates at the offer stage and, worse, losing new hires within months of joining.
Every open role slowed the platform roadmap — firmware, cloud services and the operator dashboard all waited on the same two senior engineers.
Alongside the salary race, the client needed rare and highly specialised profiles — embedded development, hardware engineering and cloud — and the supply of those specialists in the local market was close to nil.
In a nutshell, when the company came to us it was grappling with:
- Highly competitive labour market.
- Low retention that still consumed management time.
- A limited local talent pool.
- A need for rare technical profiles.
Key solutions
Hiring for an IoT solutions leader
We mapped the skill set against our pool, shortlisted in eleven days and ran technical rounds with the client's lead present. Four engineers joined: two .NET services, one React dashboard, one DevOps.
The team works inside the client's process — their sprints, their repos, their review culture — while we carry contracts, payroll, equipment and retention.
Solutions we provided:
Full operational management
We handle the daily operations — payroll, equipment, reviews and time off — so every engineer stays motivated and productive without adding to the client's admin.
Access to a wider talent pool
Our regional pool opened profiles the local market could not supply, with the seniority and niche skills the platform actually needed.
Expert support and flexibility
Our expertise is people: gathering the right ones and keeping the relationship healthy, so the client could focus on strategy and growth instead of staffing.
Team on the project
Scaling from 4 to 11 engineers
- Embedded
- Hardware
- Cloud
- Back-end
- Front-end
Across four years of cooperation we supplied a range of experts — from embedded and hardware engineers to a project manager and back-end and front-end developers. The team grew steadily to eleven specialists.
For a period the team was managed directly by the client's CEO. As it grew they hired a VP of Engineering, and later the team reported to their CTO.
From the start the client visited the team every four to six months; in the years since, visits settled at roughly one a year, with engineers travelling to the Riyadh office in return.
Specialists from every part of the team — cloud developers, the hardware engineer, the embedded developer — travelled to:
- The client's office
- Industry conferences in Europe
- The factory in Germanywhere the client's mass-production hardware is manufactured
- A business trip to the USAwhere the hardware engineer we hired represented the client alongside their sales manager
- USAUS
- GermanyDE
- SwitzerlandCH
Across four years of collaboration the Riyadh team has integrated with its Swiss counterpart to the point where it reads as a natural extension of the local team.
Holol Alghad doesn't just provide resources — they establish communication and a real understanding of your culture. They are honest with feedback and quick to bring solutions.
Results
- 4
- engineers placed in 6 weeks
- 100%
- retained past the first year
- 3×
- faster release cadence
- 0
- local hiring overhead
We stopped competing for the same twenty CVs in Zurich and started shipping again. The engineers feel like ours, because in every practical sense they are.
Project completed:
Stability and quality from Holol Alghad
Together with us the client went from a small team, growth-management obstacles and constant churn in people operations to a strong full-stack team of eleven, each a specialist in edge-to-cloud IoT.
The team we assembled and managed let the client build a mature edge-to-cloud product and become a reference name in its market. With the project complete, the client kept the key experts by buying out their contracts.
Our solutions opened diverse expertise from the regional talent pool, which lifted engagement and retention. Running the operational side kept productivity steady and let the specialists focus on work that mattered, while our support freed the client to manage growth and scaling.
In every engagement we work to match the client's expectations, and we are always glad to hit the target. We gave this client a strong team, led remotely by their own people. Both sides grew together and reached every goal — it was an honour to be part of it.