A marketing-software company in Germany needed a PHP backend developer who would stay. Not a contractor for a feature, but someone who would learn the product, ship its releases and keep its servers healthy month after month. That is what this retainer was, for close to three years.
The problem: a product team without a steady backend
The company had a product with paying customers and a roadmap that kept filling up. What it did not have was continuity on the backend. Features were being specified faster than they could be built, the product depended on a growing set of third-party services, and release and server tasks kept landing on whoever was nearest.
Hiring locally was slow and expensive. The company wanted a single engineer who could cover the backend end to end during their working day, at a cost that made sense for a small software business.
What the retainer covered
- Feature work from the roadmap. Backend functionality was specified by the product team, built, reviewed and released in regular cycles. The same engineer carried each feature from ticket to production.
- Integrations with outside services. The product talked to a number of third-party platforms over their APIs. Building and maintaining those integrations, and handling the changes those platforms made on their own schedule, was a standing part of the work.
- Release management. Preparing releases, running them against staging, deploying to production and watching the first hours afterwards.
- Server upkeep. Operating-system and PHP patching, monitoring, backups and the occasional incident, so the product team did not need a separate operations function.
How it worked day to day
- Overlapping hours. Work was scheduled so that most of the German working day was covered, which meant questions were answered the same day and releases happened when the team was awake to watch them.
- One engineer, the whole backend. Because the person writing the feature was also the person deploying it and patching the server underneath, there were no hand-offs where context got lost.
- Written down as it went. Integration quirks, release steps and server configuration were documented as the work happened, so the knowledge belonged to the company rather than to one person's memory.
The outcome
For nearly three years the company had a backend engineer it could plan around, without the hiring cost or the ramp-up of a local hire. Features shipped, integrations stayed working as the services behind them changed, and the servers were kept patched and monitored throughout. The engagement ended on good terms when the company's needs changed, with everything documented for the next person.
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