Cutting payment latency with a Rust-first backend pod
A growth-stage payments company needed senior systems engineers before its busiest season. A four-person pod rebuilt the authorisation hot path behind the existing gateway.
~420 → ~90 ms3 weeks
LogisticsFellowship hiringIllustrative composite
Building a junior engineering bench from Fellowship graduates
A logistics platform wanted to grow its own engineers instead of competing for scarce senior hires. As a hiring partner, it shaped a capstone brief and hired from the graduating cohort.
1
real capstone brief supplied by the company
Week 2
first production pull request from a new hire
3
graduates hired from one cohort
The situation
The company's engineering team was growing fast, and almost every open role was senior. Senior hiring was slow and expensive, and the leadership team worried that they had no bench of people growing into those roles.
The brief
Find a way to hire strong early-career engineers who could contribute quickly, and build a pipeline of future seniors, without the cost of running a graduate programme of their own.
What we did
The company joined as a Fellowship hiring partner. Joining costs nothing; our standard success-based fee applies only to hires.
- A real capstone brief. The engineering team supplied a problem from their backlog: a route-exception service that flags delayed shipments early. Several Fellows built versions of it as their capstone.
- Early contact. Company engineers joined two Saturday review sessions, so they saw how Fellows worked and took feedback, not only what they presented.
- Demo Day and interviews. The company met the capstone teams at Demo Day and ran its normal interview loop with a shortlist.
- A structured first 90 days. Each hire had a named buddy, a first task that shipped in week one or two and a written review at 30, 60 and 90 days.
How it went
The company hired three graduates. Because they had already worked on a version of the company's own problem, onboarding was faster than usual, and the first production pull request from a new engineer landed in their second week. For Cohort 03 the company has signed up again, and its commercial team has supplied a case for the new Go-To-Market track as well.
What we'd tell another team
- Give Fellows a real problem. It is the best interview you can run.
- Send your engineers to a review session or two. You learn more from how people take feedback than from a demo.
- Plan the first 90 days before the offer. Early-career hires thrive with structure.
Hiring partners get to see how Fellows think over weeks, not minutes. That is a better signal than any interview we could design.
Saurav Kumar Jha, Founder & CEO
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