How a network technology leader staffed a dual-discipline engineering site: 40 cloud and embedded specialists in 12 months

The Mandate: Two Engineering Cultures, One Site

Our client builds the instruments and software that the world's telecom operators use to test, monitor and optimise their networks. Its customers are the largest carriers and equipment manufacturers on the planet, and its products sit at the point where network problems are found before subscribers ever notice them.

The Romanian centre was created as an R&D centre of excellence, and it needed to be staffed across two fundamentally different engineering disciplines at the same time:

Cloud software engineering. Modern distributed platforms, services and analytics — the layer where network assurance data becomes usable intelligence.

Embedded network engineering. Firmware and low-level software running on physical test instruments, dominated by C++ and by engineers who think in terms of hardware constraints, timing and memory.

These are not neighbouring skill sets. They attract different people, live in different professional communities, respond to different arguments, and are assessed in completely different ways. Staffing both in parallel, inside one site, is effectively running two specialist searches at once.

And the structure had to be built top-down. The mandate covered site leads, team leads and individual contributors in both disciplines — meaning we were not just filling engineering seats, we were installing the site's technical leadership layer and then building the teams beneath it.

The Challenge

Embedded and C++ is the hardest pool in the market. Romania produces a large volume of web, backend and cloud engineers. It produces far fewer embedded specialists, and the senior ones are concentrated in a handful of companies, are rarely active on the market, and are approached constantly. There is no shortcut here — only network, credibility and patience.

Leadership hires define everything that follows. A site lead who is wrong for the culture does not just underperform; they make the next ten hires harder. For a greenfield engineering site, leadership quality is the single highest-leverage variable.

An unknown employer, locally. The client is a recognised name among network engineers worldwide and a leader in its Gartner category — but in the Romanian candidate market it was a new arrival, competing for engineers against companies with years of local brand building behind them.

Our Approach

Two parallel search tracks. We ran cloud and embedded as separate programmes with separate sourcing maps, separate messaging and separate assessment criteria, rather than treating "engineering" as one market. Embedded engineers were mapped across telecom equipment, automotive, industrial and instrumentation companies; cloud engineers across product companies and platform teams.

Leadership first, then the teams. Site leads and team leads were prioritised, so that incoming individual contributors were joining a technical structure with credible people at the top — a decisive argument for senior engineers evaluating a new site.

Selling the product, not the perks. For embedded and C++ engineers, the strongest argument is rarely compensation — it is what they will be building. We positioned the work on its merits: instruments and software used by the world's largest carriers, with genuine engineering depth and global product ownership.

The Delivery

40 engineering roles closed in 12 months, spanning site leadership, team leadership and individual contributors across both cloud software and embedded network engineering.

A complete technical structure. The site did not receive a stream of disconnected hires; it received a leadership layer and the teams underneath it, recruited in a deliberate sequence.

Both disciplines staffed in parallel, including the C++ and embedded roles that most commonly become the bottleneck in exactly this kind of build.

The Long View

The centre established itself as one of the group's European engineering locations, contributing to a global product portfolio in network test and assurance — a market where the client has been repeatedly recognised as a category leader by major industry analysts. The engineering site that was an empty plan at the start of our mandate became a functioning R&D operation with its own leadership and delivery capability.

Key Takeaways

• Not all engineering is one market. Cloud and embedded talent require different sourcing maps, different arguments and different assessments. Treating them as a single pool is the most common reason dual-discipline site builds stall.
• Scarce pools reward networks, not campaigns. Senior embedded and C++ engineers are not reached through advertising. They are reached by people who already know the community.
• Sequence the leadership layer first. Site leads and team leads are both hires and hiring arguments — they make every subsequent role easier to fill.
• New sites are sold on substance. When the employer brand is not yet established locally, the product and the engineering challenge have to carry the pitch. That only works if the recruiter genuinely understands both.