Filling four skill gaps on a live e-commerce platform without pausing releases
Specialists joined an existing squad mid-sprint and shipped in their first week.
- Product
- Retail commerce
- Technologies
- Magento, PHP, React, Redis
- Timeframe
- 2024 – 2026
Staff augmentation for a retail group whose platform team was two specialisations short.
The challenge
The in-house squad could maintain the platform but not modernise it: no search specialist, no performance engineer, and a checkout rewrite waiting on both.
Hiring locally for two niche roles had taken five months with nothing to show.
Two of the missing profiles — a search specialist and a performance engineer — had been open locally for five months, and the checkout rewrite could not start without both.
In a nutshell, when the company came to us it was grappling with:
- Two niche roles open for five months.
- A checkout rewrite blocked on both.
- No capacity to modernise, only to maintain.
- No appetite for a second management layer.
Key solutions
Augmenting a live commerce platform team
Four engineers from our pool joined the existing squad — search, performance, front-end and QA — with no new management layer and the client's leads still owning the backlog.
We rotated one specialist out when the search work finished, so the client paid only for the expertise still in use.
Solutions we provided:
Specialists, not headcount
Each hire covered a named gap — search, performance, front-end, QA — instead of a generic developer seat.
Inside the existing process
Our engineers joined the client's sprints, repos and review culture from the first week, with no parallel process.
Scale down as easily as up
When the search work finished we rotated that specialist out, so the client stopped paying for expertise it no longer needed.
Team on the project
From five in-house to nine with our specialists
- Search
- Performance
- Front-end
- QA
Four specialists joined the existing five-person platform squad. One rotated out when the search work completed, leaving the client with exactly the expertise still in use.
The client's platform lead kept the backlog and ran the stand-ups; we added no management layer of our own.
The squad works remotely with two overlapping hours a day and a quarterly planning week at the client's Dubai office.
The augmented squad works together in person at:
- The client's Dubai officequarterly planning week
- Two overlapping hours dailyfor stand-ups and reviews
- A joint release retrospective
- Search-performance workshoprun by our specialist for the in-house team
- UAEAE
- Saudi ArabiaSA
- EgyptEG
Four specialists joined a five-person squad and never formed a parallel team — same backlog, same reviews, same release train.
They read the code, asked three good questions and opened a pull request. No onboarding theatre.
Results
- 4
- specialists added
- -48%
- page load time
- 2 days
- to first merged PR
- 1
- invoice a month
They did not need onboarding theatre. They read the code, asked three good questions and opened a pull request.
Project completed:
A squad that could finally modernise
The client went from a five-person team that could only maintain the platform to nine people with the exact specialisations the checkout rewrite needed.
Page load dropped by 48%, the checkout rewrite shipped, and when the search work finished the client stopped paying for that specialist — no renegotiation needed.
We added named expertise rather than headcount, inside the client's existing process, and rotated people out as their part of the work completed.
Augmentation works when nobody can tell which engineer came from where. That is what we aim for every time.