PowerHub - Martyn Bassett Associates

PowerHub was looking for VP of Engineering who could transform their engineering department and scale the in-house team.

“Having Martyn Bassett Associates involved gave us an advantage because of their knowledge of the market. Despite a very competitive market we were presented with a very solid and different set of profiles to choose from.”

– Etienne Lecompte, CEO

The Search

Our client was looking for a VP of Engineering who could help transform their engineering department by scaling their in-house engineering from 12 to 32 and thereby decreasing their dependence on agencies and contractors. In addition, this hire would be tasked with integrating a newly acquired German vendor consisting of 7 Data Scientists into the existing engineering team and structure this new (and growing) team into 4 application, module-based squads.

The Client

PowerHub is a B2B SaaS company whose solutions enable renewable energy asset management. PowerHub was founded in Toronto and was acquired by Munich based BayWa r.e. in 2019.

Search Requirements

PowerHub was targeting a leader who had effectively scaled teams in a B2B SaaS company, managed off-shore teams, and was committed to focusing on architecture and deployment strategies. This leader needed to be proficient in API-driven architecture, able to be hands-on with code reviews, and fluent with the brand’s tech stack (i.e. NodeJS, MongoDB, Azure cloud platform, Python scripting for integrations).

The Hire

This candidate has been a Director level (or higher) within the software industry for the last 15 years. Previous to joining, they were a VP of Engineering for a B2B platform providing advanced analytics and asset management solutions for electrical grids and energy assets. On day one, of that role, they took over a team of 5 developers working on the first SaaS deployment which was 6 months late. Within 3 months, they were pushing out the release. They then scaled out that engineering team to 40 (split into product-focused squads), defined processes for deployment, and established release cadence. This hire also had experience breaking up a monolithic platform into a micro-services architecture and was hands-on with code reviews.

Since joining, this hire has helped to successfully build out the team and has applied a very pragmatic approach to moving the business forward.

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