Four engineers who turned a firefighting team into a platform team

Marfa Freight is a Jebel Ali freight forwarder with 2,300 staff and road, sea and air freight across 22 countries. Its twelve-person platform team looked after the booking, customs and tracking systems that every branch relied on.

The team was stuck. Releases happened once a month in a long evening, something broke most weeks, and the same three people were called every time. Hiring had stalled, because candidates could see the on-call rota.

Four engineers from our platform practice in Riyadh, a tech lead and three platform engineers, joined the team rather than working beside it. We took a fair share of on-call from week two, which bought the time to fix the causes.

Over the first six months we moved releases to a pipeline with automated checks, set service level objectives for the twelve services branches depend on, and wrote runbooks for every alert that woke someone up. Releases went from twice a month to forty a week.

From month eight we helped Marfa hire. We wrote the job descriptions, ran pairing interviews with their leads and onboarded five new engineers, then stepped back one person at a time. The last of us left in month fourteen.