BetterPet: Zero to a 60-Person Engineering Org

BetterPet served two regulated industries (pet healthcare and the property-management vetting market) through a single SaaS platform. When I joined as the first internal engineering hire in February 2023, the product had been built by external vendors for years. My job was to bring engineering in-house, replatform the product, and grow into the next phase of the business without breaking the customers who depended on us. Hands-on through the first year: I built the foundational backend and API services in code while concurrently hiring the team that would extend them.

What I built

• The internal engineering organization from scratch: 0 to 60 engineers across product, platform, data, security, and SRE
• A full re-platforming of the core product, transitioning away from legacy vendors without service disruption
• Expansion into multiple new industries on top of the new platform

The outcomes

By the time I left in July 2025, MTBF had roughly tripled (driven by vendor consolidation and the replatform removing entire failure-mode categories), and the business was saving more than four million dollars annually. During my 2.5-year tenure the business grew revenue 200%. Most of those numbers are downstream of one decision: hiring people who could become the next leaders, not just the next ICs. Compounding senior judgment in the room produces non-linear downstream velocity. The culture compounds the same way the codebase does.

What I took away

The hard thing about going from zero to sixty engineers isn't the recruiting funnel. It's keeping every hire aligned to the same definition of "good." That's done through the rubric you teach in performance reviews, the artifact you praise on a Friday, and the question you ask in a one-on-one when a project drifts. Most leadership cycles I've seen fail at this scale do so because the founders/execs don't internalize that culture compounds the same way the codebase does. Every commit either reinforces or erodes it.