How Bluecore Built a High-Performing Engineering Team 45% Faster with Remotely

Overview

Bluecore is a retail marketing technology leader that empowers enterprise brands to personalize customer engagement using behavioral data and AI-driven automation. In 2022, it acquired Alby, an AI-native shopping assistant startup founded to bring personalized, conversational shopping to life.

At different stages of growth and complexity, both companies turned to Remotely to solve the same problem: how to hire top-tier technical talent quickly, cost-efficiently, and with zero compromise on quality or culture.

The Challenge: “We didn’t just need more people, we needed the right people.”

For Bluecore, hiring velocity was critical. The engineering org needed to scale fast while maintaining a high bar for technical talent and culture fit amidst a rough hiring market. Laurent Pierre, VP of Engineering, explained that they were trying to expand the team and grow very quickly, but it was very, very hard to hire new talent.

For Alby, Kenny Teng, co-founder and CTO, was building a lean, high-impact team to power a new kind of AI shopping experience. Having spent seven years on the trading desk at Goldman Sachs for Latin America, he knew there was great talent in there, and knew that as a startup, he needed to manage his balance sheet.

'So I was like, "where can I get the best value of really talented engineers but within my budget?" And I was talking to Mahmoud [Arram] from Bluecore...who said, you know what? I know of this company Remotely, and to this day, two of my best hires are from Remotely and they're in Latin America.' — Kenny Teng, Co-founder of Alby

Despite different timelines and pressures, both companies faced the same market reality:

• U.S. hiring was slow and expensive
• Quality bar couldn’t be lowered for the sake of speed
• Startups couldn’t afford mis-hires or bloated payrolls (or recruiting fees)

The Solution

A Scalable, Cross-Functional Hiring Engine

Remotely delivered a startup-friendly hiring engine that was fast, flexible, and built to scale.

Bluecore and Alby used Remotely to build high-performing, distributed teams across engineering, project management, and sales. All hires are embedded in U.S.-aligned time zones and assessed against the same bar as local employees—on technical depth, communication, and ownership.

Laurent explains that when Bluecore started with Remotely, he thought they'd have to create a pipeline and would have a few cycles of refining the quality of engineers and the talent Remotely would bring to them.

Actually, almost round one, they brought very, very good engineers that we hired quickly. So the first batch of engineers that joined Bluecore are still with us, are very talented, got promotions. We're very, very happy with them. — Laurent Pierre, VP of Engineering

Speed was important, but so was quality and retention. Some of the Remotely engineers placed early on have remained with Bluecore for over three years, with several promoted into senior roles becoming best performing team members.

"We actually got extremely talented engineers in a very short amount of time, and that helped the company grow tremendously... great language skills, great culture, very aligned with our culture.” — Laurent Pierre

These remote hires undergo the same rigorous performance evaluations as local employees, assessed on seniority, project delivery, communication, and technical design presentations. Performance reviews consistently highlight their strong communication, ownership, and delivery velocity.

"To this day, my best engineer is actually from Remotely, and I've done everything to actually keep this guy." — Kenny Teng

Expanding the Remote Workforce with Seamless Culture

Tara Sussman, Bluecore's VP of People & Enablement, explains how they create and enable a high-impact distributed team with talent through Remotely.

"They get the same onboarding and we treat them as any other employee that's located in a different country. So they have a robust onboarding program that's both online and with their managers. They participate in our All Hands , in All Team meetings and Slack. They get to participate in our engagement survey, review process and promotion process... we've realized the best thing is to get them involved in everything right away." — Tara Sussman, VP of People & Enablement

"Every single time I've had any attrition or recycling through my resources I've reached out to Remotely and my next replacement has been from Remotely. What's amazing about it is Remotely has always been able to come up with the next replacement for me in a very timely fashion."  — Kenny Teng

Finding Operational Leverage

This approach reduced Bluecore’s average time to hire from an industry standard of around 60 days to just 33 days, nearly cutting the hiring timeline in half. Over three years, Remotely has helped Bluecore hire more than 25 contractors across engineering, project management, and sales teams, accelerating their growth while maintaining agility.

Remotely’s focus on top-tier Latin American talent gave Bluecore a major operational advantage. All hires work in the U.S.-aligned time zones, reducing friction across distributed teams, while their strong English fluency and cultural alignment enabled seamless integration from day one. 

Alongside speed and quality, this approach helped Bluecore reduce hiring costs by an estimated 35–50% per hire compared to equivalent U.S.-based salaries, providing room to scale quickly while maintaining sustainable burn rates and team flexibility.

The partnership with Remotely has been extremely successful. We've had the chance to grow the team while not incurring a drastic growth in our costs, which is always good for a product company of our size, and gain a lot of velocity in the process. If you pair velocity with cost savings, I think that's the best recipe for executive leadership to be happy with where we are right now." — Laurent Pierre

Looking Ahead: AI, Autonomy, and Global Talent

As Bluecore leans further into AI-powered marketing, the need for self-directed, tech-savvy talent is more important than ever. Remotely continues to deliver engineers who not only excel technically but also thrive in autonomous, fast-moving environments.

"We've been working with Remotely and partnering together for three years and we have found great talent in Latin America through Remotely. We have engineers that are dispersed throughout the company in different business units and teams. We've recently expanded to look for other talent and roles, including our project managements nad our forward deployed engineers." — Tara Sussman

Results at a Glance

• 25+ Remote Team Members hired across engineering, project management, and people operations
• 33-Day Average Time to Hire, compared to the 60-day market average
• Promotions and Long-Term Retention for initial hires, showcasing performance and cultural alignment
• Reduce hiring costs by an estimated 35–50% per hire compared to equivalent U.S.-based salaries

‍

‍