To scale internationally and expand their engineering capacity, Beequip needed a solution that wouldn’t compromise talent, quality, or culture.
As Lead Software Engineer, Jan van der Pas oversees the team powering Beequip’s proprietary platform. As the company continued to grow, it became clear that expanding the engineering team would require looking beyond the local talent pool.
“It wasn’t about cutting costs. It was about accessing talent and capabilities that were harder to find in the Netherlands.” explains Jan.
The Solution
Beequip partnered with Gapstars to establish a second engineering hub in Lisbon, Portugal. Rather than outsourcing work to a traditional offshore team, Beequip adopted a hybrid model: core engineering leadership remained in Rotterdam, while carefully selected engineers in Lisbon became a direct extension of the internal team.
Gapstars provided two critical capabilities:
- Efficient, high-quality talent matching: enabling Beequip to meet and assess a wide range of candidates quickly, with a strong focus on cultural alignment
- A local Lisbon hub: offering legal, HR, and operational support, removing the complexity, uncertainty and risk of employing internationally
- Integrated team model: engineers work as dedicated extensions of Beequip’s existing team, not as interchangeable resources
Through Gapstars, Beequip hired three engineers in Lisbon across distinct disciplines:
- A Ruby Software Engineer to expand development capacity
- A Site Reliability Engineer to improve application stability
- A Test Automation Engineer to support their growing platform complexity
This mix allowed Beequip not only to increase capacity but to strengthen its engineering foundation in strategically important areas.
Implementation & Collaboration
From the outset, Beequip prioritised integration between Rotterdam and Lisbon. Early face-to-face interaction played a key role: shortly after the first hires, team members from both cities met in Portugal during a Ruby conference, helping to build trust and rapport.
Bernardo Law, Site Reliability Engineer and Lisbon local, was the first hire to join the extended team. “We got to know the Rotterdam team in person when they came to Portugal for the Euruko Ruby conference. We hung around in the office, debugged some issues and exchanged ideas, and it created a different connection between us. It helped bridge that gap.” Bernardo explains.
Beequip also organises regular exchange visits: the Lisbon engineers travel to Rotterdam to experience the company culture firsthand and work alongside their colleagues, while Rotterdam team members visit Lisbon for team off-sites and collaboration (while getting to enjoy a little sunshine on the side too).
“It’s challenging to embed culture across locations. But by having these exchanges and including them in our processes and company values, we’re making it work.” Jan notes.
On a day-to-day basis, collaboration is enabled through:
- Daily stand-ups with the full distributed team
- Pair programming tools like Tuple that replicate in-office collaboration
- Shared Slack channels and weekly refinement sessions
- Using English as the default working language
Beequip have also integrated Lisbon-based engineers into its internal performance management framework, ensuring equal visibility, growth opportunities, and recognition.
While remote work brings challenges (particularly around in-person event participation), Gapstars’ office plays a vital role in fostering community for the Lisbon team. Engineers benefit from local engagement, meetups, and events organised by Gapstars, ensuring they remain connected and supported within the personal and professional development.
As Jan explains, “With Gapstars, you get two things: you get an extremely efficient recruiting machine combined with a local hub to support the tech talent.”
Impact & Results
The partnership between Beequip and Gapstars has delivered clear, tangible benefits: strengthening both the technology behind the platform and the team responsible for building it.
By extending its engineering organisation with a dedicated Lisbon hub, Beequip was able to enhance critical technical capabilities, increase delivery capacity, and raise quality and reliability standards without diluting ownership or culture.
- Improved Platform Reliability: hiring a dedicated Site Reliability Engineer enabled Beequip to raise its reliability standards across both application and infrastructure. This marked a strategic shift away from reliance on third-party providers and significantly strengthened operational resilience.
- Scalable Quality Assurance: with growing platform complexity and international ambitions, automated testing became essential. The Test Automation Engineer helped establish robust quality assurance practices that support faster, safer releases.
- Increased Engineering Capacity: the Lisbon-based Ruby Engineer seamlessly augmented the core development team, increasing delivery speed without sacrificing quality or ownership.
- Cultural Alignment: by prioritising culture fit, Beequip built a distributed team that genuinely feels like one organisation rather than a collection of outsourced resources.
The partnership has gone beyond simply filling roles, enabling Beequip to make more strategic engineering decisions that directly support its growth and international ambitions.
Looking Ahead
As Beequip carefully expands into international markets, access to a broader talent pool will be a key enabler, with their Lisbon hub playing an increasingly vital role. The success of this hybrid model has transformed how they think about talent acquisition, from geographically constrained hiring to a truly international talent strategy.
“I’m very happy with the hires we made.” Jan highlights. “The way Gapstars approached the matching made all the difference. They really understood what we were looking for. When the culture matches, everything else works.”
The partnership with Gapstars has proven that with the right approach, international engineering teams can deliver exceptional quality, seamless integration, and strategic capabilities that accelerate growth.
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Discover how Beequip scaled beyond Rotterdam to build a high-performing international engineering team in Lisbon, fully embedded into their product and company culture with Gapstars.
