Scaling and Integrating a Captive Engineering Team
Building a 130-member offshore engineering team to support explosive growth, reduce costs, and drive operational excellence in a health insurance marketplace.
The client, a technology-driven health insurance marketplace poised for exponential growth, faced a critical challenge: scaling engineering capacity to meet surging business demands while keeping costs under control. With capital prioritized for revenue growth in capturing the U65 health insurance market, they needed a solution that combined speed, efficiency, and sustainability.
RVP led the strategic effort to build and integrate a robust offshore engineering team. The initiative involved:
- Team Scaling and Integration: Rapidly scaled the team from zero to 130 engineers across two dedicated offices in Slovakia, providing full-stack platform-wide capabilities.
- Cost Efficiency and SG&A Impact: Delivered a cost-efficient engineering model that significantly reduced SG&A expenses over a three-year ramp, enabling capital reallocation toward revenue-driving initiatives.
- Compliance Frameworks: Achieved HiTrust, HIPAA, and SOC2 compliance, ensuring the platform met stringent regulatory requirements for handling sensitive health insurance data.
- 24-Hour Development Cycle: Leveraged time zone differences to create a near-continuous development cycle, accelerating feature delivery and platform enhancements.
- Overcoming Challenges: Addressed cultural, language, and operational barriers through persistent focus on communication, support, and education. This effort fostered a collaborative model that aligned teams across 4,000 miles.
- Sustainable Team Retention: Established a strong team culture and infrastructure, achieving a remarkable 90%+ retention rate, a testament to the success of the integration and collaboration framework.
The impact of this effort was transformative. The client grew to become the largest volume eBroker in the country for U65 and O65 health insurance policies. The enduring engineering infrastructure continues to support the platform’s success, contributing directly to $300–400M in enterprise value.
