Outfit is a fast-growing, venture-backed startup in Chicago building an AI-native travel platform where customers can find their next favorite spot.
We partnered with them at a pivotal stage. They were gearing up for beta testing and needed senior engineers who could ship independently, but also learn quickly and adapt as the product evolved into an agentic-assisted development phase. Within a month, three engineers from the Index.dev Talent Network™ joined their product team, scaling their technical capabilities.
Specialization: Travel Personalization, AI-Powered Recommendations, Consumer Leisure Tech
Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Market: Worldwide
Website: https://www.joinoutfit.com/
Latest Deal Type: Early Stage VC
Founded: 2024
Project Tech Stack:
- Backend: Kotlin, Spring Boot, AWS, RESTful API
- Frontend: React.js, Next.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, Tailwind
The Project
Outfit is building a travel personalization engine powered by AI. The product listens to a user’s preferences, learns their patterns and adapts recommendations in real time. From destinations to stays, food spots, and experiences, the platform curates options that feel uniquely tailored to each traveler.
The team is small. The ambitions are big. And everything depends on fast, reliable engineering output across frontend, backend and their AI technology.
When we first connected in 2024, the product was in a tight build-and-test cycle ahead of their beta release. The team wanted senior engineers who could work without hand-holding, move with the speed of a startup, and communicate clearly with their Chicago leads.
The Challenge
Outfit needed senior React engineers who could handle the entire UI layer, a Kotlin backend engineer who could build APIs and integrate directly with their AI systems, and people who could operate like an extension of their in-house team.
Local hiring in Chicago was slow. Remote hiring on their own brought another problem: finding engineers with the right blend of seniority, communication skills, and startup-grade resilience, but also the ability to learn fast and adapt to an emerging agentic workflow. As beta testing approached, engineering velocity stalled, and every delay mattered. Kirk Lashley, CTO and Co-Founder, summarized the challenge clearly:
“We’re a small team. We can’t afford developers who need months to ramp up. We needed engineering talent who could think, ship, refactor, and question decisions in the same breath. That combination is rare.”
The Solution
Total Engineers Placed: 4
Index.dev Engineers Currently Active on the Team: 2
Index.dev focused on two priorities: speed and precision of fit.
Brazil quickly became the core talent hub. It’s one of Index.dev’s strongest ecosystems for senior frontend and backend engineers, especially in React, Next.js, Kotlin, and AI-driven backend systems. The timezone overlap with Chicago meant real-time collaboration from the start.
Within a month, Outfit had four senior engineers fully integrated into their product team. Kirk Lashley, CTO and Co-Founder, recalled the experience:
“The speed was remarkable. Finding four quality engineers in a month through traditional channels would have taken us at least three or four times longer.”
Every engineer matched the exact profile the team needed: fast ramp-up, startup-ready mentality, strong English communication, hands-on ownership, and proven experience across the stack.
Eric B. – Frontend Developer
Based in Brazil with 10+ years of experience, Eric builds frontend like a true startup engineer: fast, independent, precise, and fully accountable for performance. He is fluent in React, Next.js, TypeScript, mobile-first systems, animation-heavy interfaces, realtime UI flows, and API integrations. Kirk summed it up:
“Eric feels like someone who’s been on our team for years. He brings clarity, structure, and speed.”
Gabriel J. – Backend Developer (Kotlin)
A strong backend engineer with deep Kotlin expertise, Gabriel brings experience in microservices, AI integrations, NLP pipelines, and large-scale performance optimization. He has built systems handling millions of monthly requests and has worked on AI models that deliver meaningful customer insights. He also brings leadership, clear communication, and a structured engineering mindset. As Kirk put it:
“Gabriel is the kind of backend engineer who anticipates. He makes the system better at every turn.”
Victor O. – Frontend Developer
Victor brought architectural thinking and frontend leadership. Although he is no longer on the team, his work helped Outfit push critical UI components to production during foundational stages of the product.
The Impact
With senior engineers onboard, Outfit accelerated product development and tightened release cycles. The new hires became integrated into the core engineering workflow, bringing stability, ownership, and the independence early-stage companies rely on.
Even after the initial placements, two engineers remained long-term, proving their value through consistent execution, clear communication, and reliable delivery. They grew with the team, taking on broader responsibilities as the product expanded.
- Eric works daily on customer-facing features, translating designs into functional code and optimizing UI interactions with AI models, helping bring a more responsive and user-aware experience to the product.
- Gabriel maintains backend services, designs APIs, and ensures the infrastructure can scale with their growing user base, while supporting the system’s transition toward more autonomous and AI-driven workflows.
The outcomes:
- Higher development velocity
- Faster beta iterations
- Stable delivery without added overhead
- A reliable remote extension of the local team
The partnership was strengthened through an in-person visit in 2025. Our Senior Account Executive, Daniela Rusanovschi, met the Outfit team in Chicago to review the product in testing, align on hiring needs, and discuss future plans.
She met with the founding team Simon Qin, Kirk Lashley and their engineer John Sylvain, gaining firsthand insight into their vision.
“Sitting face to face with the team gave me a much clearer view of their vision. It built trust and helped us align better on future hiring,” Daniela reflected.
…
The partnership is still ongoing. Outfit continues to scale, and Index.dev remains a trusted partner for helping them build and extend their engineering team with high-quality remote talent.
➡︎ Want to see more real examples of how U.S. companies scale engineering teams? Explore our case studies with Inveniem, Perforce, Genemod, and National Scoliosis Clinic. See how they hired senior developers, sped up product delivery, and built strong core teams with Index.dev.
