Building a team of senior software engineers in just 6 months
CuriosityStream is a US-based video streaming service that offers a wide variety of documentaries, series, shows, podcasts, and audio courses to satisfy viewers’ curiosity about the world.
As a budding startup seeking to expand its business offerings and scale up its services, the company recognized the need to build a larger tech team to achieve these growth goals. After assessing the talent gaps in the local IT market, CuriosityStream decided to leverage outsourcing to fill key engineering positions with experienced specialists.
Business need
“There’s a lack of talent in Washington DC.”
It becomes quite difficult to find talent, because everyone wants to hire seniors. And what I currently observe is that the bar of seniority has considerably dropped.
In the past few years, people with 2 years of experience got used to call themselves seniors. But when looking for new candidates, we still search for people with extensive experience.
Solution
Many business owners that I spoke to had reached great success with outsourcing. I just wanted to see if we could have the same kind of success. So far that seems to be the case.
Finding seniors was our main motivation to go for remote cooperation. To be completely honest, another motivation was reducing cost, because as a startup, we operate on a minimal budget.
Why Grid Dynamics?
Out of all companies that offered me outsourcing services, I chose two – Grid Dynamics and another one.
I gave both a test – to fill the role of a front-end developer. Grid Dynamics came in first, providing the biggest number of candidates. That’s how we started cooperation with Grid Dynamics.
Value delivered
We’re still in a fairly early stage, because we only had one front-end developer Valentyn up till a few months ago. He was the only guy building features for the web app and he has so far developed a bunch of new things.
The main one is the key component of video streaming – when you open CuriosityStream web app, you can see a video in the top half section. Valentyn also introduced subscription flow changes, added some other features, and fixed bugs.
iOS and Android developers are working on background playback. Background playback is where you can have the video playing while you open and use other apps, just like on YouTube.
After Valentyn developed the video feature, we saw that the number of hours watched has increased on our web app. And the new onboarding flow that was also developed by Valentyn lifted the paid subscriber conversion rate.
Team build-up with Grid Dynamics
We started hiring developers in Ukraine since May 2019. Now we have a team of six at Grid Dynamics and we’re looking to hire two more. So eventually, it’ll be eight, and we’ll keep this number for at least six months.
Lilia at Grid Dynamics does a great job of the initial screening for us, which saves us some time. Initial screening helps to check the candidate’s basic skills – level of English, required tech skills, ability to cope with our tasks. What we do next is look at the candidate’s personality.
But after that, we dive right into about an hour of coding session. During this time, we’re validating the candidate’s resume. Honesty and trust are our priorities, so if we see that the resume is factual, we can trust the person, as they possess the skills that they pointed out.
Advice to businesses considering outsourcing
Outsourcing is great value for a business, as hiring remotely makes it easier to scale. The main advice – try to figure out a way to integrate the offshore team with the on-site ones.
“It can be challenging, but the return on investment is definitely worth it.”
Read the full interview here.
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