Case study: Product roadmap acceleration

New York based Beyond Identity is a cybersecurity startup building multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions to eliminate password, ransomware and account takeovers. Beyond Identity verifies users by cryptographically binding identities to devices to provide the most secure and frictionless MFA experience ever.

“The Sonalake team made it really easy for us to scale up our CEE engineering operations. They got our vision, understood our needs, and selected super engineers for us who have grown seamlessly into the Beyond Identity ways of working, becoming part of our core team and culture”. Jasson Casey, CTO, Beyond Identity

The challenge

Having secured major funding to address its huge target market potential, Beyond Identity had a need to accelerate its product roadmaps and rapidly scale its engineering team. Facing a competitive availability challenge in its home base of New York - particularly in the security domain and in certain aspects of its technology stack - the company decided to investigate a partnering strategy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The strategy would further expand the company’s distributed engineering approach, introducing additional time difference and cultural diversity, and so a proven and trusted partner would be an important enabler to ensure success.

The solution

Sonalake’s Engineering Teams service was identified as a solid fit to meet the needs of Beyond Identity. Following an analysis of the target domain and technology requirements on behalf of Beyond Identity, the most efficient engineering cluster hub around which to base and build the Beyond Identity team was selected. Through a combination of existing engineers and new targeted recruits, the team was incubated within weeks, fully supported to enable effective onboarding and integration into the Beyond Identity engineering organisation.

The roles within the new team range from Core Product Development to SRE, QA and Support, while the tech stack includes a diverse range of languages, from Rust to React.

The result

A highly effective working partnership was established with Beyond Identity, providing the support to enable rapid expansion into the CEE region and to onboard engineers into the Beyond Identity processes, culture and vision.

A significant Engineering Team was formed in an established technology hub in CEE, with access for remote working from a number of cities and regions within a few hours of the hub, enabling regular in-person days alongside travelling US colleagues.

This solution provided an accelerated augmentation of the existing engineering capacity in Beyond Identity’s US base, while also removing the overhead and obstacles associated with direct establishment of operations in CEE. Sonalake’s local engineering, people and business management expertise in CEE provided for a software partnering solution in keeping with Beyond Identity’s ambition, allowing management to retain focus on the business mission.