"33% of our engineering was offshore. The Microsoft team kept every single person."
Commit Offshore staffed and ran a dedicated R&D team for Cloudyn for three years. When Microsoft acquired the company in 2017, the offshore team transitioned with the rest of the business, not a single engineer was let go.
Project details
Cloudyn was an Israeli SaaS company that helped enterprises understand and reduce their public-cloud spend. By 2014 their roadmap was running ahead of their hiring pace in Tel Aviv. Recruiting senior backend and data engineers in Israel was taking eight to ten weeks per role, and the founders were spending more time interviewing than building.
Sharon Wagner, the CEO, asked us to take on a piece of the R&D org outright. Not augmentation. A real team, with a tech lead, working on whole modules.
The challenge
Build an offshore engineering capability that could ship production code on the same release cadence as the Tel Aviv team. Hire to senior bar. No drop in quality. And do it without disrupting the existing roadmap.
The solution
We set up a dedicated Cloudyn team in Kyiv on the EOR model. Our recruiters sourced the first three engineers in nine days, working from the same scoring sheets the Cloudyn CTO used for in-house interviews. The team grew to seven, then twelve, then sixteen at peak. Roughly a third of total engineering.
of engineering offshore
partnership length
engineers lost at acquisition
The approach
Every candidate was sourced through CVCO, our internal scanner. The top names from CVCO were screened by a recruiter, then put through a recorded skill exam scored by a senior engineer on our side. Only candidates above the agreed bar were sent to the Cloudyn CTO. Time from role brief to first CV: under 48 hours.
Once hired, the team worked on the EOR model, full employment in their home country, on Commit Offshore paper, embedded full-time in Cloudyn's daily routines. Same standups, same sprint planning, same on-call rotation.
By sourcing 33% of our engineering team offshore, Commit Offshore accelerated Cloudyn's growth and contributed to our acquisition by Microsoft.Sharon Wagner · CEO, Cloudyn (now at Microsoft)
The outcome
Microsoft acquired Cloudyn in June 2017 for an estimated $50, 70M (TechCrunch sources), continuing its Azure buying spree to address cloud cost-management. The offshore team was retained in full and folded into Azure Cost Management. Several of those engineers are still inside Microsoft today, almost a decade on. For us, the retention number is the one we're proudest of: zero attrition through the entire deal.
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