Scaling a team of 34 in four months (iGaming)

Built a full-capability software team including development, senior technical and management squad to deliver a strategic streaming solution for a social gaming business.

About client

0

months

3

experts and top management staffed

100

candidates screened

The client is a global tech leader in iGaming, with key operations in Asia, Europe, and the US. With over 1,000 experts, they’ve transformed gaming through innovation, setting industry standards and leading technological advancements across continents.

Project challenges

Social gaming is an extremely competitive industry. Businesses compete aggressively in a global market – with nimble new startups launching every other week. At the same time, the industry and its tech is evolving rapidly as every operator looks to deliver ever-better customer experiences and new monetisation strategies.

Maintaining the client’s strong position in the market means expanding at speed, releasing more new games from more providers. But in July 2023, the business had only a tactical tech solution in place; it wasn’t fit for purpose over the long term. They needed to build a more scalable, strategic solution.

And in the client’s home region, it’s not always easy to build a software team from scratch. High-level development talent is harder to find than in Europe, particularly talent specialised in the client’s programming languages Java and Kotlin. The client turned to Rite NRG to build a full-operational EU development center.

In the essence:

Tech Stack Enhancement: Building teams proficient in Java/Kotlin, AWS, React to align with the client’s current technological direction
Expertise-Driven Location Selection: Identifying a region renowned for its iGaming expertise to leverage specialized domain knowledge
Addressing Scalability Issues: Tackling architecture and cloud constraints; as an example: particularly the challenge of managing a 70 TB database, to ensure scalability
Market Positioning and Time Zones: Focusing on strategies to maintain and strengthen market leadership and be efficient with managing work in different time zones

Solutions and technologies

The Delivery Center, located in a European country with a high concentration of talented professionals experienced in the iGaming sector, served as an optimal solution for our client. The approach involved building a team from the ground up, focusing on the staffing and development of senior technical and management roles, including Engineers, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, and a Vice President of Engineering & Chief Architect. This strategic initiative allowed for rapid scaling, with a total of 34 hires successfully onboarded within an impressively short span of four to five months.

Development team immediate priority was to deliver a solution that would allow the client to implement or simultaneously integrate multiple games from multiple partners more quickly, building on the client’s initial concept. It’s a complex technical feat; The expectation to the new platform is to handle MLN requests per second and utilising databases with a total higher than 70 TB.

Responsibilities included technical leadership of the project teams to ensure a highly scalable and reliable product, quality of incident response, observability, availability and product delivery, as well as defining a model for good system performance and reliability metrics.

Within three months, the Client began migrating games from the tactical solution to the strategic solution. Now since the core platform has been created, the focus is on continuous enhancement and maintenance, adding more games each cycle and further improving performance.

Results

High speed in scaling the next-gen dedicated team has helped to secure the client’s strong position in their primary US market while keeping full mature cultural fit with client’s DNA. Client was able to cover:

Rapid staffing,
Project onboarding,
Compensation & Performance review
Employee Wellbeing & Engagement
Local operational support & Infrastructure
Project management & Product Management

The business is now able to implement, integrate and stream large numbers of games much more quickly.

Looking forward to Q2 2024, the Client is set to double or triple the size of the software team, which will allow capitalise on market opportunities and trends globally and create sustainable, long-term growth in 2024 and beyond.

Here are the main achievements:

The Team:
- Crafted an engineering structure from the ground up, boasting 30 senior to staff engineers and a chief architect
- Established a management structure from scratch, with 4 engineering managers to a VP
The Delivery:
- Surpassed expectations by releasing 60 games, tripling the initial commitment of 20—a 300% boost.
Operations:
- Set up an EU development centre complete with 5 management lines.
- Achieved 24-hour team readiness, facilitating cooperation with offices in Australia and the US.
- Implemented a fully live company structure with a seamless cultural fit, integrating operational and recruitment processes across the HR departments of both the client and Rite NRG.
- Launched a new office in Krakow
- Garnered amazing feedback after 6 months of cooperation, setting the stage for further growth in 2024

Sound like the right fit for you, too?

Rite NRG gives you high-performing, nearshored developers who fit your culture, ready to go as soon as you are.

Talk to us to find out more.

Michał Nikołajuk

Chief Executive Officer

Scaling a team of 34 in four months (iGaming)