Everything was going according to plan. Well, almost.
The market was there. There was enough money. The team — not geniuses, but gathered from different accelerators. Stack — fancy, infrastructure — on AWS, pipelines — via GitHub Actions. Everything is as taught. The CTO is not a newbie. Participated in two exits, once as an architect. No rush, no cutting corners, and definitely no compromises on prod. In short, textbook case.
And then — out of the blue — 3 weeks of brakes. APIs started to twitch. Kafka — as if offended. Users started to write to the support, then to leave. AND THE CTO… he looked at Grafana and didn’t understand what exactly went wrong.
That’s what happens when you’ve built a system for a product, but not for growth. When everything looks right — until it starts to break in several places at once.
And at this point — where it is not clear whether to call DevOps, a psychologist or an exorcist — someone calls out loud not a framework, but a direction: outsourcing to Romania. And not because it’s “cheaper” there, but because in Romania they know how to save something that doesn’t seem to need saving — before it’s too late.
Romanian developers did not come out of nowhere. The country has a strong technical base: universities like Politehnica Bucharest and Babeș-Bolyai produce not just coders, but engineers with fundamental training. Which means that when it comes to overloads, they don’t fix — they redesign.
Things they don’t write about in Dev.to
Complexity doesn’t give you a warning. It just starts behaving like a living thing. And every living thing has an endurance limit.
In the case of this company, the limit was at 15,000 MAUs. They thought they’d get to 50K. They were confident that the architecture was calculated correctly. Until it turned out that the prod didn’t scale. Not because it’s bad. It’s because no one asked the question, “What happens then?”
Surprise: no one asks those questions until it starts to burn.
According to the latest Eurostat data, Romania has one of the highest densities of IT professionals in the EU per capita. And yes, many of them work in startups without fear of responsibility — simply because they are used to solving rather than waiting for instructions.
A CTO who stopped building on their own
They weren’t looking for “outsourcers.” They were looking for someone with a knack for salvation. Into the anti-chaos. And, oddly enough, the best answers were found in Romania.
Not because it’s cheaper. Not because someone recommended it. It’s just that the Romanian team asked the uncomfortable questions right away. On the first day. No NDA. No budget. Just, “Why do you have two prod bases without read replica?”
That’s where it all started.
By the way, this story involved a team we later found among the N-iX partners. Coincidence? Maybe. But they had a habit of not waiting, but doing.
A team that doesn’t keep quiet when not asked
The Romanian approach cannot be described in one word. But it can be described by one habit: thinking ahead.
They didn’t just rewrite part of the backend. They rewrote the relationship. The CTO didn’t think he could trust someone to design a prod system without a week’s worth of specs. And then he got a roadmap that outlined architectural risks that his previous team wouldn’t have even gotten to.
That’s what happens when you go not through “just another contractor” but outsourcing to a Romanian company — where the engineer thinks like a co-owner, not a temporary coder.
Key points:
- Architecture now knows about growth.
- CI/CD doesn’t just deploy, but lives in case of a crash.
- The team doesn’t ask what to fix — it warns what’s about to break.
| What happened before | What did they change? | Why did it work |
| One backender pulls prod | Cross-functional team | Division of responsibility and focus |
| Monolith with manual assembly | Modular structure with pipeline | Faster releases, less risk |
| Logic in the code and in the head of the CTO | Documented roadmap | The team now knows why they do what they do |
| Hope of chance | Predictive monitoring and alerts | Fewer crashes and no surprises |
Where once the CTO was alone against chaos, now he has a shield. And what is important — the shield is not made of slides and promises, but of working practice.
Teaming up with a Romanian crew? Turns out, it’s not a plan B. It’s the plan that should’ve been A all along. It’s when your system finally starts to breathe.
“We didn’t need help. We needed maturity.”
So said the CTO himself. Honestly, without pathos. Because he realized that you can do everything right — and still end up at an overheating point. No drama, no scandal. Just because you didn’t ask yourself one important question: “What if there are 10 times as many of us — what will fall apart first?”
And that’s where the role of the co-leader, not the doer, comes into play. It doesn’t matter where he comes from. But in Romania, for some reason, there are more of them. The ones who don’t wait for tasks. Who argue. Who are ready to do not “as they are told”, but how life will be.
This is how N-iX teams work — they don’t serve the architecture, but take on its breath. And that’s probably the whole point.
Objections that are no longer relevant:
- “We don’t have money for partners yet” — meaning there won’t be a product soon.
- “We’ve already worked with agencies — it’s rubbish” — well, they were agencies. Not people who design with survival in mind.
- “It’s too early for us to think about growth” — okay, then be prepared for it to burn you out.
Conclusion
If the CTO is serious about growing — he doesn’t need five more juniors. He needs someone to hold architecture in his head when his calendar is smoking. Sometimes that someone lives in Bucharest. Sometimes he says, “No, that’s not a good idea.” And sometimes — comes up with a solution when no one even realized there was a problem.
That’s not outsourcing. It’s shortcuts through chaos. It’s just not everyone has gotten there yet.
One CTO at Healthtech in Portland recounted, “When we came to our senses, it turned out that the Romanian team had already rebuilt our CI logic. Without being asked. Simply because it wouldn’t have held up under traffic otherwise.”
How about you?
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