Two-engineer team (Sr. Laravel + Sr. Flutter) placed to own a custom ERP at a Gujarat manufacturer

Context

The client is a mid-size manufacturing business in Gujarat running a custom-built ERP that touches order intake, BOM, production scheduling, inventory and dispatch. The ERP has two surfaces: a Laravel web application for planners and back-office staff, and a Flutter mobile application used by floor supervisors and dispatch.

The platform had been built and maintained by a single senior engineer over several years. When that engineer moved on, the business found itself with a critical operational system and no one to keep it running.

Challenge

Replacing one full-stack generalist with another would have recreated the single-point-of-failure that caused the disruption in the first place. The right answer was a small team — but it had to land fast, because production planning was already starting to slip.

Two specific constraints made the search harder:

• The Laravel codebase had grown organically over several years. The new owner had to be senior enough to read it accurately rather than rewrite by reflex.
• The Flutter app was tightly coupled to the same domain. The mobile developer had to be comfortable operating without a separate API team and able to coordinate directly with the Laravel developer.

Approach

We ran two parallel screening funnels — one for the senior Laravel role and one for the senior Flutter role. Each funnel processed over 100 applications before any candidate reached the client.

Screening had four gates:

1. Resume and portfolio relevance to long-lived production codebases
2. Asynchronous technical assessment focused on reading and extending existing code rather than greenfield exercises
3. System-design conversation with our internal lead
4. Final interview with the client's IT lead

Both placements completed inside five weeks of the brief.

Outcome

The team onboarded together. Their first sprint was deliberately scoped to reading and documenting the existing system rather than shipping features — this gave the client an artefact (an internal architecture note) that survives independent of any one engineer.

Both engineers are now embedded with the client's IT lead and jointly own the ERP roadmap. Knowledge is being captured as they go, so the single-point-of-failure that triggered the engagement does not recur.