Allurion was founded in 2009 by Shantanu Gaur and Samuel Levy while they were studying at Harvard Medical School. They came to Remotely after launching a successful medical device (Elipse Balloon), and, in partnership with an agency, an initial version of their companion smartphone app. The founders wanted to “in-source” the software layer and continue to build out the digital platform and their 360-degree weight loss experience.
Building an “in-house” engineering team with Remotely
“When I joined, we actually had an offshore team doing most of the mobile work and some of the cloud work,” explains Chris Martinez. Allurion’s VP of Engineering. Allurion had a lot of plans to build out their digital platform to help people with a comprehensive weight loss program, and needed to build out an “in-house” team to do this work –- quickly and effectively. “The hiring process for software is tremendous in the US - we were trying to find a mix between nearshore and someone that’s going to be far off in another time zone. That’s the challenge we reached out to Remotely for.”
The candidates Remotely brought forward were already matching that criteria if not above that criteria... It was super helpful in streamlining the process and making it easy for us to react and make decisions quickly on hiring those folks. We didn’t have to do a lot of vetting.
Allurion wanted to build a team of qualified, top-tier mobile and web developers, without sacrificing time-zone overlap — and provided Remotely with some initial screening criteria, namely around the skills required for each role. Chris and his team saved a lot of time by not having to go through hundreds of resumes, or having to do the initial screening in house… "[Remotely] did that for us."
Being able to move fast, set up interviews, get candidates in front of us, get an initial screening in place, work with our HR team – all that has been a really nice process we worked through with Remotely. Having the ability to be flexible, meet at different hours and use all kinds of collaboration tools, it’s been key.
Managing sensitive data in healthcare and the EU
One challenge Allurion had was making sure they set up their growing remote team in a way that was in compliance with regulations for GDPR and healthcare-specific regulations. “The data we store for our customers is highly sensitive. It’s healthcare data, and we also have a lot of our customers in Europe, so GDPR is an issue… our main concern was… can we make sure we have all the compliance for those regulations.”
Remotely was very helpful in helping us understand that even if we go nearshore, let’s say, there are still certain rules we can abide by with GDPR and some of the other healthcare-specific regulations.
Allurion’s Remotely engineering team
Within Allurion's first year with Remotely, they had build a team of 7 engineers based across Central and South America working through Remotely -- across mobile, web, full-stack and data engineering.
