The challenge
A new enterprise customer came in with a hard security requirement: data generated in India had to be processed by engineers living in India, under Indian employment. The Indonesia team could no longer service the account. The customer was in Pune, and Podifi needed an Indian team, in country, in weeks.
The hiring bar made it harder. Podifi doesn’t screen on stack. They hire on fundamentals — engineers who understand how systems work underneath whatever language they happen to be using. It’s a real bar, and it doesn’t show up on a resume.
What we did
We started with the lead. Podifi’s leadership flew from San Francisco to interview a three-person shortlist for the lead role and closed the India lead in person before the rest of the build began.
We turned “fundamentals” into a screen. Working with Podifi’s engineering leadership, we defined the reasoning patterns, system-thinking cues, and depth signals that separated the engineers Podifi wanted from the ones who looked similar on paper. Every candidate ran through that filter before reaching a Podifi interview.
We employed the team through EOR in India, so there was no entity to set up and no months of waiting. The data-residency requirement that started the engagement was met by the structure from day one.
The result
A ten-engineer team in Pune, anchored by a lead Podifi’s executives chose themselves, twelve weeks from kickoff to a working team. The Indonesia center kept running the global business, and the India team began servicing the India account.
