A Series A team in the Bay Area needed a rare profile in the south of Brazil, run quietly and run fast. The role got filled, with more than one qualified candidate to choose from.
“I was blown away because LatamCent was able to find more than one qualified candidate who met all of it. It turned out it wasn’t a unicorn, at least not for you.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
At a glance
- Company: TestBox
- Industry: B2B SaaS
- Stage and HQ: Series A, San Francisco Bay Area
- Brazil footprint: technical solutions architects in Rio, customer and forward-deployed engineers centered on the office in Caxias, in the south
- Partner: LatamCent
- Client contact: Alex Nauda, CTO
- Roles placed: engineering, engineering management, technical solutions architects, senior customer engineers
- Featured search: an experienced engineering manager for the customer engineering team, based in the south of Brazil, run through a private pipeline
- Headline result: multiple qualified candidates for a profile the team expected to be nearly impossible to find
- Cost: comparable US engineering manager compensation runs 3 to 4x the LatamCent placement
The challenge
TestBox brought Alex Nauda in as CTO during a fast growth stage, first fractional, then full time. His mandate was stabilization. Steady the way the company supports customers. Steady the reliability of the systems. Tighten incident management and operations. And level up management across the company, especially in Brazil.
The company runs two teams in Brazil. Technical solutions architects sit in Rio, a customer-facing technical role. The engineering team, the customer engineers you would now call forward-deployed engineers, sits in the south, centered on a physical office in Caxias. One of the hardest problems was bringing those two teams closer together and changing how the customer engineering team was run.
The fix was a person, not a process. TestBox needed a more experienced manager to lead that team. And the profile was narrow. Someone located in the south of Brazil, which is not the most populated part of the country. Someone with real engineering management experience who had been through hard things with engineering teams. Someone who had been an engineer themselves. And ideally, someone who had worked with startups in the US or the Bay Area, so they could navigate both worlds day to day.
“We need somebody who’s in a specific location, specifically in the south, which is not the most populated place in Brazil. Engineering management experience, and real depth of going through tough things with engineering teams. And has been an engineer themselves.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
That is four hard requirements stacked on top of each other, in a specific geography, for an urgent hire.
Why the search had to run quietly
This search was different from the roles TestBox had filled before. It was urgent, and it was sensitive. The team was not sure what it would find, and it preferred not to broadcast the opening across the company until it did.
So LatamCent built a separate pathway for it. A private Slack channel. A separate Notion board with shared data on every candidate and exactly where each one sat in the process. Nothing public, nothing noisy, full visibility for the people who needed it.
“One of the things that I found really helpful was when you created a separate recruiting pathway for this. We kept it in a private Slack channel. We had a separate Notion board, which is a really great way of sharing information in a transparent way, with shared data about each of the candidates and where they are in the process.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
What happened
TestBox handed over a job description with very specific requirements and low expectations about what was actually out there. The team was not sure the person even existed.
LatamCent did the sourcing, the screening, and the vetting against all four requirements at once, then presented candidates through the shared board. The follow-up ran in Slack, tuned to a busy CTO. Present enough to keep the search moving, quiet enough to stay out of the way.
“You’ve been really helpful in how you followed up with me. I can sometimes be extremely busy and sometimes I really don’t have time. You’re following up in Slack. It’s not noisy, but it’s a helpful reminder.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
The result surprised the team. The profile they expected to be a unicorn came back with more than one qualified candidate who met every requirement. The manager was placed.
The results
The role that stalled the customer engineering reorg got filled. TestBox got an experienced engineering manager in the right location, with the right depth, who could bridge a Bay Area startup and a team in the south of Brazil. The reorg had the leader it was waiting on.
“We have a lot of confidence in you to find what we need, the type of people that we want to hire.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
The proof is in what came next. That manager is now expected to sit on the interview panels for future engineering hires, which means every future search gets sharper because there is a shared reference point for what good looks like on the team.
“Since you placed the manager who’s, without a doubt, going to be involved in some of that interview process, I think that will help as well. You can have that additional overlap.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
This was not a one-off. TestBox had already filled several roles with LatamCent across engineering and its customer-facing technical teams before this search, which is why the harder, quieter one landed on the same desk.
By the numbers
- Multiple qualified candidates for a four-requirement profile the team expected to be nearly impossible to source
- Multiple roles placed across engineering, engineering management, technical solutions architects, and senior customer engineers
- Comparable US engineering manager compensation runs 3 to 4x what the same senior talent costs through LatamCent in Latin America
Advice for leaders on the fence
The profile you have written off as a unicorn is usually not a unicorn. TestBox stacked four hard requirements, a narrow geography, deep engineering management experience, hands-on engineering background, and US startup exposure, and expected to come up empty. They got more than one qualified candidate to choose from.
The lesson is not to lower the bar. It is to run the search with a partner who can hold the whole bar at once, keep it quiet when it needs to be quiet, and move at the speed a Series A company actually moves.
Ready to fill the role you think is impossible?
LatamCent sources, vets, and places pre-vetted LATAM talent in 21 days or less. Engineers, engineering managers, GTM, and finance. We handle payroll, compliance, and contracts, and we back every placement with a replacement guarantee. You get Bay Area-level talent at a fraction of Bay Area cost, run through a pipeline you can keep as quiet as you need.
“We’re a Series A company in the Bay Area in the age of AI. It’s going to change really, really fast.”
Alex Nauda, CTO @ TestBox
Find the person everyone told you does not exist. Start at latamcent.com.
