Company name:

Non-disclosed (marketing approval pending)

Company size:

1000+

Services provided:

SRE adoption

Duration of project:

ongoing

Engineers (FTE):

150+

Technology:

Azure, AKS, RestAPI + Events, including Azure Functions on K8s

Relout used its Talent as a Service model to provide a solution that went beyond traditional recruitment.

• Engineer-to-Engineer Vetting: The recruitment process was led by Relout’s founder, Gerard Stańczak, an SRE expert, who personally verified the technical skills and seniority of candidates. This technical oversight was a key factor in winning the client’s trust over standard HR agencies.
• Night Shift Sourcing: Because the client operates in Pacific Standard Time (PST), the Polish lead had to work until 1:00 AM CET. Relout specifically recruited senior engineers whose personal lifestyles allowed them to work these hours long-term.
• Budgeting Realities (Poland vs. LATAM): Relout used market data to show that while Polish rates (approx. $56/h) were higher than in Colombia, the technical maturity and efficiency of Polish talent provided better annual value, even when accounting for more vacation days and holidays in Poland.

The technical environment was massive, involving Azure Government and Commercial clouds, 60-70 node production AKS clusters, and a Kafka instance handling 20Gb/s peak ingestion.

Key SRE implementations included:

• Incident Management: Relout built a new incident response system from scratch, using War Rooms and dedicated Slack channels to centralize communication.
• Blameless Culture: They introduced Blameless Post-Mortems to focus on root cause analysis and actionable items rather than finger-pointing.
• Capacity Planning: A custom framework was created for the Data Ingestion System (DIS) to manage resource allocation for microservices using KEDA for autoscaling.
• Business Observability: Relout moved beyond basic technical metrics to create
• Grafana dashboards that allowed stakeholders to track business health, such as daily IoT file processing volumes.
• To ensure the transition was not just reactive, Relout developed a structured SRE Roadmap for 2026.

The success of the first SRE Lead role allowed Relout to build a “Team of Five” within six months, including Cloud Leads and DevOps engineers.

• Managing the Time Difference: Relout optimized the work schedule to maintain a 50% to 75% overlap with the US teams. This ensured critical communication happened during the 3–4 hours when all global teams were online.
• Relout-Funded Integration: As part of the TaaS model, Relout paid for team integration events – such as team dinners and social syncs – to build a cohesive unit. This helped reduce turnover and improved the team’s internal working relationship at no cost to the client.
• Frequent Communication: The team participated in many technical and consulting calls, often after 9:00 PM CET, to overcome resistance from the previous vendor and ensure smooth knowledge transfers.

In eight months, the transition to an SRE-driven culture delivered major improvements:

• Service Uptime: All key services reached an uptime of 99.5% or higher.
• Stability: The monthly incident count was reduced by 50% within four months.
• Efficiency: Alert noise was cut by 25%, and the team reached a state of zero active unresolved incidents, clearing a long-standing backlog.