How Gorillas scaled their development capacity after raising €230M in funding
About the company
Gorillas is a German ultrafast grocery delivery company which uses dark stores and is operating in around 35 cities from roughly 130 locations in 4 countries.
As of December 2022 Gorillas was acquired in full by Getir.
Challenge
As a venture backed fast growth company operating in a crowded space, Gorillas is in a constant race to expand to new markets and scale it's offering to an ever growing customer base.
Following the company's series B financing round, amounting to €230B, hiring new talent for the product and engineering teams became a core challenge. And with the scarcity of senior tech talent, this was a real hurdle for growth.
Solution
Establish an ongoing partnership with a talent provider that can quickly support with staffing senior software engineers across Web Frontend, Backend, iOS, Android and DevOps, and product specialists.
To handle Gorillas' talent needs in full, UPPER created a dedicated internal unit to select the right talent from their pool of thousands of vetted experts.
Prior to being acquired by Getir, Gorillas scaled their teams with 18+ engineers from UPPER and successfully navigated their hyper growth phase.
UPPER supports us with quick action and a great collaboration. They helped us find top engineers almost on the spot - an ability that is invaluable for us as a company in hyper-growth.
Head of engineering
solution implementation Timeline
Discovery and Requirements
An Engineering Director from UPPER clarified the tech details with Gorillas to understand the team requirements and create a ramp-up plan.
Staff critical roles and leads
Start with the mission-critical and the lead roles, who would later assist in scaling up the rest of the team.
Folger
- Java
- Kotlin
- Spring
- Kubernetes
- +10
Gary
- Java
- Kotlin
- GraphQL
- SpringBoot
- +10
Daniel
- Java
- Kotlin
- Android SDK
- Retrofit
- +10
Michael
- Java
- Kotlin
- SpringBoot
- Apache Kafka
- +10
First team ramp up
With the leads in place, the team entered its first expansion phase, adding 6 new members.
Elisei
- Java
- Spring
- TypeScript
- Angular
- +10
Victor
- AWS
- GCP
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- +10
Oliver
- GO
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- GCP
- +10
Kamil
- Swift
- Objective-C
- Python
- Firebase
- +7
Emanuel
- Android SDK
- Java
- Kotlin
- RxJava
- +10
Rareș
- Java
- Kotlin
- RxJava
- Jetpack
- +7
Second team ramp up
The team continued to scale with a second phase, adding 8 more people.
Calin Radu
- Swift
- Objective-C
- Firebase
- SwiftUI
- +7
Tudor
- Java
- Kotlin
- Spring
- Docker
- +10
Sydney
- Java
- Kotlin
- GraphQL
- Spring
- AWS
- +7
Matilda
- Java
- Kotlin
- Spring
- PHP
- MySQL
- AWS
- +7
Koen Donald
- Java
- Kotlin
- Spring
- Kubernetes
- +10
Cristian
- Java
- GraphQL
- Spring
- Docker
- +7
Slawomir
- Java
- Kotlin
- Spring
- Docker
- +10
Piotr
- Java
- Kotlin
- JavaScript
- React
- Node.js
- +10
Delivery of the solution
The team works as part of a wider product organisation directly with Gorillas, on a long term basis, using agile for delivery.
UPPER is definitely the partner we’re counting on for scaling our teams.
Head of engineering
Key Results
The solution allowed Gorillas to quickly scale up the engineering teams and keep up with their rapid growth.
- 18 senior engineers
- ~3 days per hire
- Managed growth
- All-senior talent
gorillas benefited from
Speed
Assembled a team of 18 senior developers and other tech roles in under 1 month overall.
Expertise
UPPER's CTO-level engineering directors and talent specialists as 'team architects'.
Scalability
The ability to quickly scale teams in response to increasing user demand.
