How Frontline Group scaled their core US team with three engineers in Latin America

Frontline had already tried outsourcing the work once. The company they used didn't have anyone internally who could run a product build using scrum and project methodology, so the product got developed, but not effectively.

That left Denise with a rebuild to run and almost no capacity to run it with. The internal team was two people: a senior DevOps and architecture lead, and a senior developer, both already carrying the existing platform. She had a plan, an MVP definition, and executive sign-off. What she didn't have was hands.

She got quotes from three companies. Two came back expensive, and both wanted to take the project in and control it. She didn't need that - the game plan already existed, and she was going to be the scrum master and product lead herself. The budget was tight enough that a permanent hire carried a risk she wasn't willing to take before the product had even shipped.

What convinced Denise was who was doing the interviewing. A recruiter reads a CV, runs it through a keyword filter, and forwards whatever comes out the other side - and CVs are now rewritten by AI for every application, so that filter catches less than it used to. She wanted candidates assessed by someone who could tell what was true.

From there the process moved fast. She worked with Cloud Employee to write the job descriptions, pulling in her senior engineer and senior director to define exactly what they needed. Interviews were scheduled within three weeks of sign-off. Around fifteen CVs came through, eight went to interview, and three were hired: two senior engineers and a QA engineer.

Her internal process ran in two stages. Her engineer and director interviewed first - an hour to ninety minutes, purely technical, plus whether the person could work alongside an American team. Only then did Denise come in, to talk scrum methodology and see whether the rapport was there. She was hiring for the code and the person, and puts the weighting at 80% personality.

Time zone decided the region. Denise ruled out anywhere too far from US East Coast hours, which took Asia off the table. Engineers in Brazil gave her senior developer - on central time in Minnesota - a clear morning window before standup, and gave the team enough overlap to collaborate without living in meetings.

The shape of the team mattered as much as the hires. Frontline kept its own engineers running architecture and direction, and used Cloud Employee for the build capacity around them - a small US core with an extension team attached in Brazil, rather than handing the project to an agency to run.

Once they started, the team ran full scrum. Daily standups over Teams, sprint reviews every two weeks demoed live to internal stakeholders, retros after. The engineers presented their own work, in English, to a US audience.

The beta released on March 3rd 2026, nine months after the first engineer started. Frontline Connect went live inside Frontline Call Center and is now heading to market.

The QA function was built from nothing. When the QA engineer joined there was no test environment, no automation, no regression testing and no smoke testing - the developers pushed to the director and that was it. Denise briefed him to treat it as his own company: work out the best practice and set it up. He built the pipelines, built the automation, and demoed it live to stakeholders so they could see manual hours collapse into minutes. He then ran a knowledge transfer to three internal team members so Frontline could carry it themselves.

The engagement came in under budget and under headcount. The original plan was around five developers and five QA. After working the MVP through with Cloud Employee's CTO, the number came down - and the smaller team still delivered.

Denise singles out that CTO involvement specifically. Not a recruiter relaying answers, but a technical opinion from outside her own team, asking what she meant, what she actually wanted, and whether she had considered another route.

This was never meant to be permanent, and both sides said so from the start. The team plugged in, built the product, handed over the QA function and stepped away. That is the model working as intended - an engagement can run six months or it can run four years, and Frontline got to decide which without committing to headcount it might not need after launch.