At a glance
- Hires closed
- 28
- Engagement
- 6 months
- Embedded recruiters
- 3
- Anchor leadership hire
- 1 Team Lead
- Sourcing reach
- Berlin + relocation
- Avg. time-to-offer
- 24 days
The challenge
A two-person team, six months, and a 30-engineer plan.
A Series A e-commerce and logistics startup based in Berlin had raised to scale its engineering org from two founding engineers to roughly thirty inside six months — including a first Software Engineering Team Lead, multiple software and data engineers, and a quality function to keep release confidence high as the team grew.
The founders had no in-house talent acquisition team and no time to build one. Contingent agencies would have fragmented the employer brand at exactly the moment it needed to be sharpest in the Berlin market. A single in-house recruiter could not carry the load. They needed senior, dedicated capacity from week one.
The engagement
Three embedded recruiters. One brand. One bar.
We embedded three senior recruiters inside the company for six months. They used the client's ATS, sat in on engineering standups, owned the candidate experience end-to-end, and represented the employer brand directly in the Berlin and international markets.
Each recruiter owned a slice of the funnel — leadership and engineering, data and platform, quality and tooling — with weekly funnel reporting and shared calibration sessions to keep the bar consistent across every offer.
Roles hired
Leadership, software, data and quality — in one engagement.
Software Engineering Team Lead
First leadership hire and the anchor of the engagement. A hands-on lead with prior scale-up experience inside an e-commerce or logistics platform — capable of standing up the team's engineering rituals from scratch.
Software Engineers
Backend, frontend and full-stack engineers across the order, inventory and fulfilment surfaces. Mid-to-senior IC profiles with TypeScript, Node, Go and Python experience operating against high-throughput logistics workloads.
Data Engineers
Pipeline and warehousing specialists to build the analytics backbone — order events, fulfilment SLAs, supplier performance — feeding both ops dashboards and ML-driven demand forecasting.
Quality Engineers
QA leads and SDETs embedded inside delivery squads to lift release confidence as the team grew. Strong on test automation, contract testing, and observability for a fast-moving e-commerce stack.
Candidate landscape
Berlin-local plus a managed international relocation track.
Berlin local market
Tapped Berlin's deep pool of e-commerce, logistics and marketplace engineers — many already familiar with the city's startup operating cadence and looking for a higher-ownership next step.
EU & UK relocation
Targeted senior engineers across the EU and UK who wanted to relocate to Berlin. We owned the relocation conversation end-to-end: timeline expectations, family considerations, and offer framing.
Outside-EU relocation & visa
Sourced candidates from outside the EU who qualified for the EU Blue Card or the German skilled-worker visa. Coordinated documentation, immigration partners and start dates so visa processing didn't stall hiring.
Languages & culture
Engineering operated in English, so the bar was set on technical depth and culture-add — not on German fluency. That widened the qualified pool by an order of magnitude.
How we ran it
Six months, three phases.
- Month 1
Calibration & leadership hire
Three embedded recruiters joined the founding team's standups, learned the stack and product, and ran the Software Engineering Team Lead search in parallel — closing it inside the first six weeks so the leader could shape the bar for everything that followed.
- Months 2–5
Active build across four functions
Daily outbound across Berlin and the wider EU/UK/EEA market. Structured screens, hiring-manager debriefs, weekly funnel reporting, and a parallel relocation track for international candidates needing visa, housing and onboarding support.
- Month 6
Scale, document, hand over
ATS hygiene, source-of-hire reporting, and a written hiring playbook handed to the new Team Lead and the founders — so the company inherited a working hiring machine rather than a half-finished thread.
The outcome
A 30-engineer org and a working hiring machine.
28 hires closed across six months — including the founding Software Engineering Team Lead, software engineers across order and fulfilment surfaces, data engineers building the analytics backbone, and quality engineers embedded inside delivery squads.
Roughly 40% of hires relocated to Berlin from elsewhere in the EU, the UK, or outside Europe — every one supported through visa and onboarding by the embedded team. Average time-to-offer settled at 24 days. The company exited the engagement with a documented playbook, a calibrated bar, and a clean ATS handed to the new Team Lead and a first in-house recruiter.
FAQ
Scaling a Berlin tech team, answered.
- Why use embedded recruitment to scale a tech team in Berlin?
- When a startup needs to go from a small founding team to 30+ engineers in under a year, contingent agencies fragment the brand and a single in-house recruiter cannot carry the load. Embedded recruitment puts senior dedicated capacity inside your hiring org, using your ATS and your voice, with the bar calibrated to your standards across every role.
- How do you handle relocation to Berlin for international engineers?
- Relocation is run as a parallel track. We pre-qualify candidates against EU Blue Card and German skilled-worker visa criteria, set realistic start-date expectations during the first call, and coordinate with the client's immigration partner on documentation. Most relocating hires in this engagement started within 8–12 weeks of offer acceptance.
- Why was the Software Engineering Team Lead the first hire?
- The Team Lead anchors every subsequent hire. Closing the leadership search first meant the Lead helped calibrate the bar, ran final-round technical loops, and owned onboarding for the next 25+ engineers — compounding quality across the engagement.
- How fast can engineers from outside Germany start?
- Local hires typically started in 4–6 weeks (notice period dependent). Relocating EU/UK hires started in 6–10 weeks. Outside-EU hires needing a Blue Card or skilled-worker visa started in 8–14 weeks depending on consulate processing times.
- What happens at the end of a 6-month embedded engagement?
- We hand over a documented hiring playbook, calibrated scorecards, source-of-hire reporting, and a clean ATS to the in-house team — typically the new Team Lead and a first in-house recruiter. The goal is for the company to inherit a working machine, not a dependency.
Related
Service: Embedded Recruitment →
A senior recruiter inside your hiring org for 3–9 months. The model behind this engagement.
Industry: E-commerce →
How we partner with marketplaces, D2C brands and the platforms powering modern commerce.
Roles: Tech →
Engineering, AI and infrastructure roles we recruit across Berlin, Germany and Europe.
Scaling a tech team in Berlin?