Case study

    Dow Jones strategic expansion of its engineering team in Bulgaria

    Dow Jones partnered with Nortal to rapidly expand its Sofia engineering hub, adding skilled .NET and DevOps talent to support its global news and data platforms.

    Service

    Technology and Engineering Modern Software Development

    Industry

    Telecommunication and Media

    dow_jones_logo_full_colour

     

    With prominent and respected brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Factiva, MarketWatch, and others, Dow Jones is a global leader in news and business intelligence solutions. Its R&D department develops cutting-edge technologies that ensure its customers receive information when and where they need it. Dow Jones is also part of News Corp, a global media and publishing company.

    A global news and data giant strengthening its technology foundation

    Unlike most of our clients, who benefit from the expertise of a local service provider to enter a new location and set up a technology division, Dow Jones already had an operating team in Bulgaria when it approached Nortal.

    Established back in 2006 as a compact unit of strong software developers, the Sofia office has been successfully collaborating and supporting the global tech team in the development of distinguished web and mobile applications, APIs, and data feeds. In 2020, after assessing the high efficiency and outstanding work of this unit throughout the years, Dow Jones made an important decision to additionally grow the team and expand its capacity.

    Recruiting and shaping a high-performing engineering unit in Sofia

    To assist Dow Jones with the swift scaling up of its team in Bulgaria, the company needed a trusted ally with deep knowledge of the talent pool and experience in attracting and retaining highly skilled tech resources. The successful set-up of the team of News UK, another company from the News Corp group, supported the choice of Nortal as a strategic partner for Dow Jones's planned growth.

    The main purpose of this collaboration was to build a high-performing tech unit that will act as an extension of Dow Jones’ core technology team. After a period of synchronisation, it was transferred to the Bulgarian subsidiary of Dow Jones.

    Once the initial test succeeded, c-Quilibrium reorganised its development model and entrusted all future projects to our teams.

     

    We have transparent and constant communication via Microsoft Teams. On average, c-Quilibrium’s Belgian team has 4–5 hours of direct communication with our team each day. 

    Ivaylo Ivanov, Director of Engineering, Dow Jones

    “In partnership with Nortal, we managed to find exceptional people that joined several of our scrum teams. These experts, along with their different professional backgrounds, brought another perspective to the teamwork. Each of them managed to quickly become familiar with the part of our platform related to their work and with the established company practices.”

    Impact at a glance

    A high-performing team built

    We assembled a .NET engineering unit, aligned it with Dow Jones’ practices, and transferred it into the Sofia organisation without disruption.

    Seamless integration into the global team

    New engineers joined multiple scrum teams, adapted quickly to workflows, and contributed to high-impact platforms across the Dow Jones ecosystem.

    Ongoing support for scaling talent

    After the initial team transfer, Dow Jones continued relying on us to attract and onboard additional Software and DevOps engineers for the Bulgaria hub.

    Successful team transfers, seamless onboarding and ongoing growth

    Initially, 6 .NET engineers with different levels of seniority were recruited and hired through Nortal. After several months of collaboration through the model of Dedicated teams, the people were successfully transferred to the Dow Jones’ subsidiary in Sofia and fully integrated into the team’s structure and culture.

    After the first successful transfer, Dow Jones continued to benefit from Nortal's expertise and support, trusting the local partner to attract and smoothly onboard more Software and DevOps Engineers to their local unit. 

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