Northwind Freight
Two backend engineers who cleared a six-month queue without breaking what already worked.
The situation
Northwind builds routing and dispatch software for regional trucking companies. By their Series A they had a product customers loved and an engineering team of three — two of whom were the founders. Every new feature went through one of them, and the review queue had quietly stretched to six months.
They didn't want a big agency or a rotating cast of contractors. They wanted two people who could read a large Go codebase, ask good questions, and not need hand-holding. Their last attempt at hiring abroad had ended with a developer who disappeared for a week mid-sprint.
What we did
We spent the first call mapping the actual bottleneck — it wasn't a shortage of ideas, it was a shortage of senior review capacity. So we matched for seniority and judgment, not just raw output.
Both engineers we put forward had shipped production Go at companies of a similar size. We arranged a paid two-day work sample on a real (non-sensitive) part of the codebase before anyone committed. One of the two founders sat in on the first week of standups so the handoff of context was deliberate, not assumed.
I was bracing for the usual thing where you spend more time explaining the work than it would've taken to do it yourself. That just didn't happen. By week three I forgot they weren't on our payroll.
How it turned out
Within a month the review backlog was gone. The founders got back to selling and roadmapping instead of rubber-stamping pull requests. Both engineers are still with Northwind more than a year later, and one now runs the team's on-call rotation.