Outstaffing
Fractional development team for a B2C pet nutrition brand
About the project
When the Untamed pet nutrition brand reached a new stage of growth, they needed to lay a solid technical foundation for future expansion. With a new strategy defined and approved, their CTO initiated the search for a skilled team of backend, frontend, and DevOps Shopify developers.
Here’s what Untamed identified as crucial for the project’s success — and how Dinarys aligned with those requirements:
#1
Requirement
A strong Shopify development team, staffed by a third-party vendor, with all HR processes fully managed
Dinarys has well-defined staffing and HR processes that reflect our internal culture and enable our fractional teams to seamlessly integrate with clients’ teams
Project gain
A fractional team of developers with the right expertise and full cultural fit staffed in less than three weeks
#2
Requirement
Proven expertise in developing ecommerce platforms using Shopify (themes, liquid, GraphQL APIs), AWS services, React, PHP, and related technologies
Dinarys has a strong portfolio of completed and ongoing projects using various tech stacks — including all technologies requested by the client — and solid experience working with Shopify
Project gain
Complete technical alignment between the client’s expectations and our capabilities
#3
Requirement
The ability to work within a fractional collaboration model, with a CTO overseeing the entire software development lifecycle
Dinarys has provided senior engineers who work semi-independently while aligning their efforts with Untamed’s architectural vision
Project gain
Smooth collaboration between our fractional team and the CTO enables on-time achievement of all development goals
#4
Requirement
Experience collaborating across multiple time zones and maintaining effective communication with an international development team
Dinarys has international development teams experienced in adapting to the communication styles and working hours of clients from the USA, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, and Asia
Project gain
Seamless cooperation with international team members (from the UK, UAE, and the Philippines) despite time zone differences thanks to strong English skills, shared dedication, and a proven framework for distributed collaboration
#5
Requirement
Full predictability and transparency in the development process, including timelines, budgeting, and deliverables
Dinarys provides a dedicated project coordinator and account manager who monitor project progress, deadlines, and finances to prevent bottlenecks and ensure smooth delivery
Project gain
Timely delivery of the planned scope of work within the agreed budget
#6
Requirement
Ability to quickly scale the team up and down to align with changing project scope and business priorities
Dinarys has a proven team-scaling strategy that allows for flexible adjustment mid-project no matter the reason: project expansion, reduced scope, developer replacement, etc.
Project gain
Timely and cost-efficient team expansion to support the project, with development resources scaling as the scope increases or decreases
To date, we have worked with Untamed on:
Building a brand new system for customers to manage their subscriptions, with improved UX, more features, elevated performance and incorporating Untamed’s new brand.
Completely revamping the storefront with an optimised UX and substantially improved code structure and configurability, that increased conversion.
Improving resilience and availability of the backend API by re-architecting the AWS infrastructure.
Significantly improving the team’s efficiency and deployment success rate (to 100%) through CI/CD setup and DevOps automation.
Documentation enrichment and ongoing updates to ensure everything remains current and well-tracked.
The entire Dinarys team is exceptional! Best vendor I’ve worked with. Always deliver on time, skilled, responsive, and team-oriented. Excellent communication, strong ownership, proactive feedback culture, and really nice people!
Dr. Petros Demetriades
Fractional CTO at Untamed
More details on the project
Untamed is a UK-based pet nutrition brand committed to providing high-quality, vet-formulated cat food made with real meat and no animal derivatives. With a strong focus on transparency, animal welfare, and science-backed nutrition, Untamed has built a loyal customer base across the UK and beyond.
Jump to the part of the collaboration that interests you most:
Part I
Starting to implement the technical strategy
As part of the technical strategy, Untamed identified the need to enhance and integrate a React-based dashboard for managing customer subscriptions. To bring this vision to life, Untamed looked for a team with hands-on experience in similar projects — and a vendor capable of handling the full recruitment cycle, all HR responsibilities, and ongoing technical evaluation of team members.
How Dinarys handled the staffing request
Before jumping to the staffing process, we held our unique company-wide general enlightenment and engagement session. It includes:
Defining and prioritizing technical
requirements for each role
Clarifying Untamed’s mission, values, and culture to ensure alignment throughout the staffing process
Qualifying internal talent by evaluating technical
skills and cultural fit
Addressing remaining gaps by recruiting
external candidates
Using this approach and following our standard external talent staffing process, our recruitment team gathered a highly skilled engineering team in less than three weeks.
Step 1
Requirements discovery
Creating a clear, prioritized staffing profile that includes both hard and soft requirements
Step 2
Candidate shortlisting
Building a shortlist of candidates who meet at least 80–90% of the client’s must-haves, including English skills
Step 3
Internal screening and best-in-class selection
Ensuring that only vetted, top-tier talents with a strong cultural fit and tech expertise are shown to the client
Step 4
Client feedback
Reaching alignment and confirming who joins the project
Step 5
Onboarding
Ensuring a smooth start for specialists and fast value delivery for the client
The more detailed the information about the open role, and the faster the client responds, the higher the chances of filling the position quickly and efficiently. The Untamed team was highly responsive to both candidate and recruiter questions and provided thorough project details. Our collaboration with Untamed clearly demonstrated that the key to success is transparency, so the candidate can be fully confident that expectations and reality will align while the client can find a perfect match for their project, ensuring a win-win situation with productive collaboration for both parties.
Anna Malkova
Recruitment Specialist at Dinarys
Setting and explaining HR processes
To maintain a 98% retention rate and high employee and client satisfaction rates, our HR processes include:
Mentorship and support
New hires are guided by mentors to quickly adapt to project and company workflows through code reviews, tech talks, and peer groups.
Regular 1-on-1 meetings
These help to identify and resolve blockers early, gather feedback, reinforce connection with the core team, and provide consistent support throughout the project lifecycle.
Ongoing feedback
This involves regular, real-time input from team leads, peers, or clients about an employee’s work, communication, and impact for quick course correction, reinforcement of good practices, and building a transparent culture.
Performance reviews
These include input from team leads, peers, clients, and sometimes self-assessments and cover technical proficiency, communication, teamwork, and alignment with company values.
Client and employee satisfaction surveys
Employee surveys help HR understand team morale, engagement, and pain points across projects, while client surveys assess satisfaction with communication, delivery quality, and team performance.
Clients want long-term commitment and expect clarity and consistency from their vendors. Mutual understanding is key to successful collaboration with fractional teams, which is why we focused on building stable, well-structured, and adaptable HR processes. We believe that when people feel supported and truly part of the team — even under a different brand — they deliver the quality that earns lasting partnerships.
Marina Chuprina
HR Manager at Dinarys
Backend rebuilding and code optimization
Dinarys specialists joined forces with Untamed to help enhance and integrate a React-based dashboard responsible for managing customer subscriptions. To support its functionality, under the direction of their CTO, we developed a new back end tailored to Untamed’s evolving needs. The process included:
Building new infrastructure
Migrating existing customers to the new environment
Ensuring a stable, uninterrupted deployment process
As part of the job, we also assisted in refactoring the legacy codebase where it was relevant in terms of the new back end: streamlining architecture, improving performance, and optimizing the system for long-term scalability and maintainability.
Our joint effort consisted of the following steps:
Analyzing the codebase
01 →
Identifying and isolating problem areas
02 →
Modernizing and restructuring code
03 →
Optimizing code
04 →
Improving test coverage
05 →
Updating documentation
06 →
Testing and deploying
07
08
How backend
rebuilding affected system
performance:
Reduced system downtime during migration
Improved backend response time and code maintainability
Presented fully functional customer dashboard, ready for future scaling
Want to staff a team with set HR processes?
Our fractional development teams are ready to go.
Contact our staffing department to provide your project requirements and get:
A list of best-fit candidates within two weeks
A fractional development team with all HR processes managed on our side
Developers who know how to deliver on time and within budget
Part II
Expanding the team for backend support and execution of the new scope of work
After deployment, the client decided to trust us with backend support — resolving incidents, optimizing performance, and ensuring stability as the platform evolved. This included:
Immediately resolving issues with minimal service disruption
Ensuring stable performance under increased user load
Making continual improvements based on real-world use
At the same time, Untamed’s technical strategy called for various steps: specifically, conducting a technical audit of existing third-party integrations and optimizing the functional side of the UX for pages critical to conversion. That’s why Untamed decided to expand the team.
Onboarding
new team members
Our clients appreciate quick and efficient onboarding, whether at the start of collaboration or when integrating new specialists mid-project. To deliver this, we provide:
All-around project onboarding
The process is guided by a tech lead or delivery manager
to ensure the new hire understands the project context, client expectations, and their specific responsibilities.
Structured onboarding reduces ramp-up time,
avoids delivery delays, and helps maintain project
continuity and quality.
Onboarding
Technical environment setup
Access to project documentation
Codebase walkthrough
Alignment with delivery goals, communication rules, and team workflows
Knowledge handover to new specialists
This involves transferring project-specific
knowledge from outgoing or current team members
to new ones.
Our goal is to minimize knowledge gaps, reduce onboarding
time, and help new specialists contribute effectively without
disrupting the project flow.
Knowledge handover
Architecture details
Codebase insights
Task history
Client expectations
Assigning the project coordinator
We assigned a project coordinator as the team expanded and managing supplementary activities — such as communication, scheduling, and resource planning — became more time- and effort-intensive. The project coordinator’s responsibilities included:
Resource management
managing the team; arranging additional personnel when needed; handling rates, working hours, and other operational details; and overseeing resource replacements and workload adjustments if necessary
Time tracking and reporting
ensuring that monthly hours tracked in the client’s system align with Dinarys’s internal tracking
Invoicing
ensuring that all billable hours are accurately recorded, approved, and reflected in invoices issued to the client in line with the agreed terms and timeline
Checking performance of the fractional team
monitoring performance of the fractional team, ensuring that each specialist meets the project’s quality standards, deadlines, and communication expectations; regularly reviewing progress; gathering feedback from the client; and proactively addressing any performance-related issues
The project coordinator is the bridge between the team and the client. While the importance of this role is not always immediately recognized, the absence of an experienced and proactive project coordinator can lead to a loss of visibility into costs and team status, poor planning, and dissatisfaction on both the client’s and the team’s sides due to the lack of a feedback channel and a centralized point of communication. Information starts to scatter, decisions become chaotic, and — most critically — responsibility becomes blurred.
Karina Khomutova
PMO and Project Coordinator at Dinarys
Conducting a technical audit of third-party integrations
To strengthen the platform’s foundation, we conducted a thorough audit of all existing third-party integrations together with the Untamed team. The goal was to identify bottlenecks and prepare the system for future feature expansions.
With this audit, our technical goals were to:
Uncover legacy code dependencies affecting performance
Provide a clear roadmap for modernization and upgrade paths
Establish a baseline for scalable future integrations
UX-focused functional
optimization for checkout and
subscription pages
As part of our evaluation of the existing Shopify storefront, under Untamed’s guidance, we identified a number of critical issues (both in terms of the user experience and technical implementation) that impacted maintainability, performance, and future scalability. Here’s what we found:
Scattered and hardcoded logic
Funnel settings, product descriptions, prices, and product data were hardcoded across multiple files, making updates time-consuming and error-prone, especially for developers unfamiliar with the original setup.
Underused Shopify features
Shopify-native tools like schema sections, metafields, and locale files weren’t used, limiting content flexibility, localization, and future scalability.
Outdated tech stack
The use of jQuery and unnecessary JavaScript bundling slowed down performance, especially on mobile, and added friction to development workflows.
UX and interaction issues
Missing focus states, visual feedback, and interaction bugs (like blocked selections) made the shopping experience confusing and inconsistent for users.
No editor-friendly setup
Content couldn’t be managed via Shopify’s visual editor. Every small change required a developer, blocking non-technical team members from contributing.
Our team rebuilt the funnel from the ground up using a modern approach:
01
Made the code modular, dynamic,
and easy to maintain
02
Replaced hardcoded elements with flexible,
data-driven structures
03
Removed outdated tools in favor of lighter, more efficient alternatives
04
Simplified and documented
the overall structure
05
Aligned everything with platform best practices for long-term scalability and performance
Part III
Accelerating deployment cycles with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps
As part of building a scalable, future-ready technical strategy, Untamed decided to implement CI/CD pipelines and establish DevOps practices.
With a clear vision and deep understanding of the product, the client’s CTO guided our team, defining priorities, architecture, and quality standards. While we handled the execution, his leadership ensured that everything aligned with broader development goals.
The aim was to eliminate manual steps, reduce errors, and speed up feature releases by introducing automated build, test, and deployment workflows, boosting both team efficiency and release confidence.
What we achieved:
2x faster deployment cycles
Fewer production bugs due to automated validation
Reduced infrastructure management time and cost
Part IV
Providing thorough documentation at every stage of development
Recognizing the importance of strong documentation for sustainable development, Untamed made documentation a key part of the technical strategy. They ensured that everything — from architectural decisions to functional changes — was clearly captured and regularly updated.
Guided by these priorities, our team enriched the existing documentation and established a routine for keeping it current and accessible. This not only improved knowledge sharing and onboarding but also created a reliable source of truth for all project stakeholders.
Why documentation is an important part of our work:
Streamlines knowledge transfer for internal and external teams
Reduces onboarding time for new developers
Provides a clear record of all major system updates
What made this project special was the dynamic we formed as a fractional team. The collaboration with the client stood out in particular: their ability to set a clear technical direction and involve us in the broader vision gave our work even more purpose. It’s always rewarding to work in a setup where independence and guidance complement each other so well. Working with someone who not only understands the strategy but brings deep technical expertise and a high level of professionalism elevated the entire process. It created an environment of trust, focus, and shared ownership from day one.
Roman Fesko
CTO at Dinarys
What We’ve Achieved
Our collaboration with Untamed has involved both development efforts and setting up a comfortable and efficient working environment. The results speak for themselves:
Business Results
Faster time to market:
Reduced feature release cycles from weeks to days through CI/CD and deployment automation.
Greater client confidence:
Clear documentation, stable backend performance, and responsive support fostered long-term trust.
Lower support overhead:
Fewer customer tickets and incidents thanks to an improved UX and system reliability.
Technical Results
Modern, scalable back end:
Full refactoring and optimization resulted in a more maintainable and performant system that was ready for future expansion.
Improved system stability:
A clean architecture and modular code reduced bugs and technical debt.
Robust DevOps pipeline:
Establishing DevOps best practices helped streamline development and deployment, ensuring faster releases, fewer errors, and more reliable infrastructure scalability.
Knowledge transparency:
Up-to-date documentation enabled smooth onboarding of new team members and easier system maintenance.
At the heart of Dinarys’s decision-making process — when taking on a new project — is alignment with our internal values and the client’s responsiveness to our mission and cultural stance. We’re sincerely grateful for Untamed’s readiness to collaborate with a Ukrainian fractional development team, despite the risks. Thank you for your trust and bravery.
As a company of dedicated cat lovers, we fully support and appreciate Untamed’s mission to provide all cat owners with nutritious food free from animal derivatives.
The Dinarys Team
Have a Shopify-based project and need developers who are ready to start without hassle?
Dinarys will assemble a top-notch fractional development team after just one call with our CTO:
Senior-level developers with the required technical expertise and experience on similar projects
Fast onboarding for projects of any complexity or scale, supported by hands-on leadership and mentorship from our top engineers
High-quality development aligned with your vision and architectural requirements
Roman Fesko
CTO at Dinarys
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