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[EO Argentina] Building Engineering Bridges Across Borders With Roger Einstoss

Roger EinstossRoger Einstoss is the Co-founder and CEO of Braintly, a company that connects US businesses with top engineering talent from Latin America. With over 12 years of experience in tech talent acquisition, he has helped companies like Volkswagen and T-Mobile build remote engineering teams. Roger specializes in bridging the gap between businesses and skilled developers, offering solutions in staff augmentation and agile team management.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [02:56] Roger Einstoss explains how Braintly bridges US companies to Latin American talent
  • [04:26] Common mistakes businesses make when hiring technical talent
  • [06:27] The difference between staff augmentation and squad teams
  • [08:22] Braintly’s rigorous cultural and technical vetting process
  • [12:02] Key advantages of hiring engineers from Latin America
  • [17:06] The importance of both technical and cultural interviews in hiring
  • [20:05] How Braintly’s people-centered values shape its work culture
  • [23:54] Best practices for managing remote engineering teams successfully
  • [26:21] Real-world client success stories and their impact
  • [37:50] Roger’s experience with Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Argentina

In this episode…

The tech talent gap is a growing challenge for businesses worldwide, with many struggling to find skilled engineers who align with their company culture. As demand for software developers surges, companies are searching for efficient and cost-effective ways to scale their teams. Could the key to solving this problem lie in Latin America’s booming engineering talent pool?

According to Roger Einstoss, a seasoned entrepreneur specializing in tech talent acquisition, Latin America offers a unique combination of skilled engineers, cost efficiency, and cultural alignment that makes it an ideal destination for US companies. He highlights how businesses often underestimate the complexity of hiring and vetting engineers, especially when working across borders. By bridging this gap, companies can not only find exceptional talent but also create more diverse and innovative teams that thrive in today’s global market.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Roger Einstoss, Co-founder and CEO of Braintly, to discuss how US businesses can build remote engineering teams with Latin American talent. Roger shares the biggest mistakes companies make when hiring technical talent and Braintly’s approach to vetting engineers. He also gives insight into fostering a strong remote work culture and maintaining high performance in distributed teams.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

  • “We define ourselves as a software company and a bridge between the US and Latin America.”
  • “The cultural alignment between the US and Latin America is one of our strengths.”
  • “Our focus is always on building engineering teams in Latin America.”
  • “We want developers involved in the business, not just the code.”
  • “It’s all about quality and delivery; that’s the important thing.”

Action Steps

  1. Improve your recruitment process: By aligning technical and cultural aspects during recruitment, you ensure a better fit, which reduces turnover and enhances team dynamics.
  2. Leverage AI tools in hiring: Using AI allows for a more objective assessment of a candidate’s problem-solving abilities and ensures a focus on how they arrive at solutions, which is crucial for understanding their thought processes.
  3. Focus on cultural alignment: Doing so ensures that new hires are more likely to integrate smoothly into the team, promoting a harmonious and productive work environment.
  4. Utilize remote talent: Hiring talent from different geographic locations, such as Latin America, not only provides cost benefits but also brings diverse perspectives and aligns with time zone advantages for better real-time collaboration.
  5. Maintain open communication: This fosters a supportive work environment, allowing for real-time problem-solving and ensuring team members feel valued and heard, which is essential for remote work success.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of inspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Roger Einstoss of Braintly. You can find them at braintly.com. That’s like brain and then tly. Roger, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. You know, since you, you can basically hire Braintly and they could be your engineering team out of Latin America. So some of the interesting tech interviews I’ve done include I had the one of the Co-founders of Zapier on the podcast, which was an interesting one. I had one of the Co-founders of Pipedrive. I remember Pipedrive had at the time maybe around 10,000 customers. Now they I think they have over 100,000 customers. I had the founder of AWeber, which is like a email campaign system and many more. You can check them out on inside.com. If you type in any keyword in there, you’ll find whatever strikes your fancy. I guess you could say so. Check those out and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25. We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that by helping you run your podcast. Sometimes we help people get on podcasts. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Roger, you know us. We are kind of like the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy so a host can just show up, create amazing content, create amazing relationships. Most importantly, just run their business for me. The number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. Or being a guest in Roger’s case, you know, feel free to check out rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com. I am excited to introduce. Roger is Co-founder and CEO of Braintly. He’s been connecting top talent from Latin America for over 12 years. They work with companies like Volkswagen, T-Mobile and many, many, many more. And Roger, thanks for joining me.

Roger Einstoss: 02:46

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 02:48

So let’s just start off and talk about Braintly and what you do. I’m going to pull the site up as as you’re talking.

Roger Einstoss: 02:56

Cool. Thank you. Well, we basically connect top talent from Latin America with companies in the US. So when you’re a company in the US and you need to find the best talent in Latin America, we are the bridge that can connect you with that talent and also help you not only hire people, but also managing them, keeping them all always like a happy, self-motivated. So we we define ourselves like as a software company, but also as a bridge between the US and Latin America.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:35

What kind of clients come to you?

Roger Einstoss: 03:39

Okay. Our ideal client, it’s. An SMB, a small or medium sized business in the US. Most of them in the East coast. But we also have clients in the West Coast. So companies between 2030 and 100 employees are most of our clients, but we also work for big corporations like Volkswagen or Tupperware, not only in the US, but also in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico. So our focus today, it’s it’s more the US, but we have experience working for different countries around the world.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:18

What are some of the big mistakes you see people making when hiring technical people?

Roger Einstoss: 04:26

Wow, that’s that’s a good one. Most of the times thinking if they are technical people thinking that they have time to go through the process, but at the end of the day, not having time to do it, you know that many times you have CTOs, that they have the skills to interview people and decide if they are the right person or not for the team, but they don’t have the time to do it, but they think they have. And when it comes to non-technical founders, most of the of the times that they believe that it’s easy to vet an engineer to talk with a developer, to understand what they want for their career, and not delegating that that big task in someone who can do it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:14

So is it when you say that like a CTO, they think they have the time, but they’re not spending the time they need?

Roger Einstoss: 05:23

Yeah. Yeah. Because you know that in medium sized companies, most of the time the CTO is also writing code. So they have to split their time in leading with people, writing code, solving problems in productions, and also trying to achieve the objective that the CEO set for the company. And above all of that, they also need to take care of of hiring and recruiting. and it’s something that usually technical people don’t like to work in hiring and recruiting. So that’s where we we come and say, hey, we can help you. We can be your, your partner in this, in this difficult task that you have to get done.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:14

Talk about a little bit, Roger, how it works to work with you. Are you hiring? You know, is someone from your team working with them or are you hiring an external person? Talk about how it works.

Roger Einstoss: 06:27

Yeah, basically we have two models. One of the models is the staff augmentation. So if you have a technical team, let’s suppose you have a CTO or you have a VP of engineering. We can hire only the engineer, the developer or the quality assurance guy. And we assign that person to your team. So you will manage the day by day of that person. And we take care of hiring, recruiting, administrative staff taxes paying them in Latin America. Everything. But you are the one who manage the day by day of that person. You are the manager. The other model is something we call squads team. It’s basically an agile team where we assign not only the developer but also the project manager. And it’s more focused on non-technical founders who need someone who can help them think the roadmap, think the product, understand them. How is the best solution for some real problem that they have? Translating that like real life problem to a to a technical solution. So we always say at the end of the day that we are building engineering teams in Latin America. But when you make like a double click, we have those two models like the managed services model and then all the staffing model.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:57

Talk about the vetting process for a second. You have to go out and obviously you’re helping these companies in your supplying them with a great engineering talent for their team. What’s some things in the vetting process when you’re helping hire these people for the companies that you have found is valuable?

Roger Einstoss: 08:22

Yeah, that’s the the best part of the process. It’s it’s very, very important for us to understand and and assign time to meet the technical people in the client, with our technical people, to deeply understand the kind of profiles that they need, not only the technical things, but also the soft skills. I mean, if, if, if they are a senior developer, if they will be like making decisions alone, or it will be if they will be making like architectural decisions, different kind of things that we need to get that information from the client. And once we have that information, we start the recruiting process. And we have two instances in in our site. First, we make like a like a cultural interview because before understanding that that’s the right person from the technical point of view, for us, it’s even more important to know that they are the correct fit from the cultural point of view. Because remember that one of the best thing that we have in Latin America is the cultural alignment between the, the, the way that people in the US work and the way that people in Argentina or in Latin America in general work. So that’s the first step. The second one, it’s a technical interview where we empower people to solve that problem using AI because we want to know and we want to like evaluate them, not only solving the problem, but also how they explain the decisions that they, that they made because we know that they will use obviously, Google, ChatGPT, Copilot, whatever. But the most important thing is to understand how they think the solution. So once we did those two steps, we if we understand that it’s the right candidate for you, we present the candidate to a client saying, hey, we choose this person, Jeremy, and we choose him because A, B, and C, and we believe it’s the right fit for you because A, B and C, and you can have like your personal interview, technical interview, or you can just say, hey guys, I trust you. And if you say that that’s the correct person, it’s okay for me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:49

Talk about why Engineering, right? Because you could have been like, we’re going to source customer service people in Latin America. Why did you choose the engineering software developer route?

Roger Einstoss: 11:04

Yeah. The answer is focused. I’m a software engineer. My partners are also software engineers. So the thing that we have been doing for almost 20 years is writing code. Talking with developers, leading developers and technical people. And we don’t know how to make a good interview to a customer success manager. We can learn it. Yes. Of course. But we are really, really good vetting engineers. And that’s why. And we also know that there is like a huge gap between the amount of engineers that the market in the US needs and the amount of engineers that are offered. So why not? Is the answer. Why not all the focus on engineers, which is the thing that we know how to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:57

What are some of the advantages of hiring in Latin America?

Roger Einstoss: 12:02

The first and the biggest one I think it’s time zone. Time zone difference. With Latin America, it’s 1 hour or 2 hours depending on, on the on the on the city. For instance, with the east coast of Argentina, right now we have two hours, but most of the year we have only one hour. The second thing is the cultural alignment that people in Latin America have with people in the US, not only from the personal point of view, but also the way that we understand work. We are like natural challengers. We are, for instance, if you compare talent from Latin America with talent from from Philippines, for instance, we are more. I would say we like to say no, I don’t think that that this is the the right path. Why not? We do this or that? Because we grew up going through different kind of crises. I always tell that in Argentina last year we had like 300% of inflation. So we thought how to make things happen despite the context. And that’s like an amazing secret sauce for talent from Latin America. And it’s also cost efficient hiring an engineer in in in Latin America. It’s up to 50 or 60% cheaper than hiring an in-house engineer in in in the States. And last but not least, the quality of the talent. Argentina, for instance, is top in the top three of the of the countries that when it comes to English writing and talking and speaking. Sorry. Also the we we are in the top ten of the best universities in Universities in the world. We have like Nobel Prizes. So you find an amazing pool of of talent and people that really want to make amazing things happen.

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