How Meez Hired its Entire Platform Engineering Team Through Remotely, One Role At a Time

What does your hiring process look like when every engineer on your team came through the same model, the last one arrived within two weeks, and the one before that is now your company's AI expert?

100% of the platform engineering team hired through Remotely, with most of Meez's broader engineering organization following the same model. The most recent hire closed in 1 to 2 weeks, and the one before that is now the company's in-house AI expert.

About Meez

Meez is a SaaS platform built for and by professional chefs that transforms recipe content into an interactive database, backed by Craft Ventures, Struck Capital, and FJ Labs. The company began working with Remotely early, when the CTO was tasked with building a tech team from scratch after moving away from an offshore boutique agency. What started as a skeptical comparison test against top US recruiting firms became the foundation for how Meez hires engineers today: a post-Series A Platform Engineering team responsible for cloud infrastructure, DevOps tooling, and the systems that keep the broader engineering organization shipping at pace.

The Challenge

Meez came to Remotely with two separate but related problems, surfaced at two different moments in the company's growth.

The first was a quality and cost problem. Hiring good senior engineers in the US meant absorbing high salary expectations plus recruiting fees as high as 30% of first-year compensation, with most of the hiring work falling on the CTO. An offshore boutique agency had not solved it.

The second was a coordination problem. As the platform team grew, Meez had tried distributed contractors in India and in Vietnam. The friction was structural, not a people problem.

"With time zone and everything, it was really difficult. So having Remotely be in the US-based time zones kind of helped us streamline our operations and become more productive." — Daniel Roestorf, Platform Engineering Manager at Meez

For a platform team responsible for keeping everyone else shipping, reviews delayed and standups misaligned by twelve hours had a direct cost on the velocity of the whole engineering organization.

The Solution

Marylee Rosenwald was employee number two at Meez. She had grown an engineering team from scratch before, and she knew what bad hiring felt like. When a trusted mentor pointed her toward Remotely, she did not take the referral on faith. She ran a parallel test: Remotely alongside two or three of the largest recruiting firms in the US, firms she had used before and trusted.

She was not looking for a cheaper option. Salary expectations for senior engineers in the US are high, recruiting fees run as high as 30% of first-year compensation, and most of the vetting work falls on the hiring manager regardless of who sources the candidate. What she was looking for was quality. The Remotely candidates gave her that.

"The ones that impressed me the most were Remotely. They were better technically, they had very good English, and they were very committed, hardworking, culturally very nice. Every single one of them impressed me, and that was very rare and had never happened before." — Marylee Rosenwald, CTO at Meez

The speed surprised her. A few days after the kickoff call, candidates were already arriving. What followed was not just fast: it was organized. Every profile came with detailed reporting, clear salary expectations, and no ambiguity about what the candidate needed.

"If they say somebody is good, I know it's coming from the right place. And usually they were right." — Marylee Rosenwald

Meez brought on four Remotely developers in its first four months.

As the company scaled past Series A and the Platform Engineering team formed, the same model held. What changed was the operational layer: a Slack message triggers a search, a link in the inbox approves an expense report, and thirty, sixty, and ninety-day check-ins arrive automatically so the team can give structured feedback without scheduling anything. For a platform engineering manager running a small team without HR overhead, that simplicity is the product.

"Hiring through Remotely is probably the easiest hiring process I've ever had. We've pretty much hired within a week or two every time we post a job because Remotely comes to us with the best candidates kind of matching exactly what we're looking for." — Daniel Roestorf

"I just send them a Slack message like, 'Hey, we're hiring this person,' or, 'Hey, we need to tweak this,' and they're on top of it." — Daniel Roestorf

The Engineers in Practice

The question that comes up in every international hire is whether performance will match expectations. At Meez it has not just matched: it has exceeded.

"There's always a bit of a fear when hiring international talent that they're not going to perform to the same standard that you expect, but we found that with Latin American talent, they're especially dedicated to the work, and they fit right into the team and honestly go above and beyond our standards." — Daniel Roestorf

The most recent platform hire makes the case on its own terms. As Meez began moving fast on AI adoption across the engineering organization, the team needed someone who could lead that work rather than learn alongside it. Remotely surfaced a candidate who was already there.

"I managed to find somebody who has done a bunch of AI courses, is doing AI-first development, and that's been incredibly useful as the company is adapting and adopting all these AI technologies. We got somebody in the door who's kind of now our expert in that." — Daniel Roestorf

The engineer came in and became the company's reference point for AI implementation across the development process. For a team moving fast on a technology with real security and reliability implications, having that expertise in-house from day one shortened a learning curve that most teams are still on.

"It's kind of a relief to get this expert from Remotely to help us implement AI at our company and throughout our development process." — Daniel Roestorf

Today the entire three-person platform engineering team was hired through Remotely. The team operates as one unit.

"It feels like we're one cohesive team. It feels like they're all in-house hires." — Daniel Roestorf

Looking Ahead

The relationship between Meez and Remotely has the quality of something that no longer needs to be managed, just used.

"The relationship with Remotely is very natural. It feels as if they're completely embedded in our company. The people you're talking to who work at Remotely and are representing their company, it's people you can go have dinner with, you can grab a coffee with. It feels like they're part of the office culture." — Daniel Roestorf

Key Results

4 engineers hired in the first four months, the first two outperforming candidates from top US recruiting firms tested in parallel.

1 to 2 weeks from posting a role to hire, consistently across every position the platform team has opened.

$2M+ saved since 2022, a consistent 44% cost reduction versus hiring equivalent US-based engineers (~$480K per year).