Mid-Market Financial Technology Firm
Internal developer platform cut onboarding from 3 weeks to 2 days
A mid-market fintech company was losing engineering talent to larger competitors and struggling to onboard new hires efficiently. We built an internal developer platform that transformed developer experience and became a competitive advantage for recruitment.
The Challenge
The company had grown from 15 engineers to 80 in two years, but the developer experience had not scaled with the team. New engineers spent their first three weeks setting up local environments, getting access to systems, and learning undocumented tribal knowledge. Senior engineers were constantly interrupted to help with environment issues and answer questions that should have been documented. The result: slow onboarding, frustrated engineers, and a voluntary attrition rate that was 2x the industry average.
Our Approach
We started by interviewing engineers across all teams to understand their daily friction points. The top three: environment setup was manual and fragile, there was no standard way to create and deploy new services, and monitoring required deep institutional knowledge to navigate.
We built an internal developer platform in three phases. Phase one focused on environment standardization — we created Dev Container definitions and automated setup scripts that gave every engineer a working development environment within an hour. Phase two built a service scaffolding system — a single command that created a new service with CI/CD pipeline, monitoring dashboards, database provisioning, and security configurations pre-configured. Phase three consolidated observability — a unified dashboard that made it easy for any engineer to understand the health and behavior of any service without specialized knowledge.
Throughout, we documented everything in a searchable knowledge base integrated into the developer workflow, so engineers could find answers without interrupting colleagues.
The Results
Onboarding reduced from 3 weeks to 2 days — new engineers make their first production deployment on day two.
First production-ready service in 4 hours — down from 2-3 weeks of setup and configuration.
Voluntary attrition dropped from 24% to 11% — developer satisfaction surveys showed a 40-point improvement in tooling satisfaction.
Senior engineer interruptions reduced by 65% — the knowledge base and self-service platform handle the majority of questions.
Engineering velocity increased 35% — measured by deployment frequency and feature throughput per engineer.
Recruitment advantage — the developer platform is now featured in engineering job postings and has been cited by candidates as a differentiator in their decision to join.
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