The Challenge
Rocket Internet, through its food delivery subsidiary Foodpanda, decided to open a new development center in Porto, Portugal. The mandate was ambitious: stand up a fully operational engineering office and staff it with over 130 engineers in roughly four months. The center needed to be productive quickly, integrating with distributed teams across multiple time zones and contributing to a platform serving millions of users.
Beyond raw headcount, the challenge involved establishing engineering culture, onboarding processes, tooling, and team structures that could sustain long-term quality and velocity.
What We Delivered
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Recruitment at Scale — Led the hiring pipeline from sourcing through offer, coordinating with local recruiters, universities, and the tech community. Screened hundreds of candidates across backend, frontend, mobile, QA, and DevOps disciplines. Achieved the target of 130+ hires within the four-month window.
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Team Structure Design — Organized engineers into cross-functional squads aligned with product domains, ensuring each team had the right mix of skills to own features end-to-end.
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Onboarding and Ramp-Up — Created structured onboarding programs that brought new hires up to speed on the existing platform, codebase conventions, and deployment workflows. This reduced time-to-productivity significantly compared to ad-hoc approaches.
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Engineering Culture — Established practices around code review, continuous integration, sprint planning, and retrospectives. Built a culture of ownership and collaboration from the ground up.
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Infrastructure and Tooling — Set up local development environments, CI/CD pipelines, and communication channels to ensure the Porto office was a first-class participant in the global engineering organization.
The Outcome
The Porto development center went from an empty office to a fully staffed, shipping engineering hub in under four months. Teams were contributing production code within weeks of formation. The center became a key part of the company’s global engineering capacity, demonstrating that rapid scaling is possible when recruitment, culture, and process are treated with equal priority.