The Hyderabad team — a Saturday out at Ramoji Film City
The moment
How it happened.
In autumn 2024, Rithin — Vela's co-founder and technical lead — travelled back to India to get married. What started as a wedding trip turned into the founding of the engineering team on the ground in Hyderabad.
Rithin used the weeks around the wedding to interview, hire and start training a small team of engineers locally. By the time he flew back to London, the company had gone from a UK-only cell to a distributed operating model — with a growing engineering base in one of India's strongest technical talent markets.
A trip to get married became the moment the engineering team doubled, and the moment ship velocity stopped being a bottleneck.
What it changed
Two effects, both material.
~40%
Fully-loaded engineering cost
Cost per engineer landed materially lower than an equivalent UK-only hire, freeing capital for growth spend.
2×+
Ship velocity
Feature velocity roughly doubled inside three months as the Hyderabad team came online — with time-zone overlap enabling near-continuous build cycles.
Distributed
Operating model
The company shifted from a UK-only team to a UK–India distributed model — the shape it still runs in today.
The economics were the obvious win. The velocity effect turned out to be the bigger one. The engineering team could now cover a wider working day, which meant faster releases, faster fixes, and a compounding advantage in the pace of product change.
Life in the Hyderabad office
Distributed on the org chart. Together in the room.
A remote-first engineering culture only works if the team on the other end of the line actually likes each other. The Hyderabad team has built its own rhythm — whiteboarding in the office by day, cricket and bowling after hours, weekend trips out to Ramoji Film City. The photos below are a snapshot of the first year.
A whiteboard, a bowling alley, a cricket pitch.
Office by day. Bowling and cricket after hours. Team dinner most Fridays.
Why it mattered
The platform behind every subsequent chapter.
Every chapter that follows in Building Vela — the H1 shareholder update, the Reddit surge, the Nestlé activation — depends on an engineering organisation that can ship weekly. That organisation was built in Hyderabad, in the months after Rithin's wedding. The bet on distributing early paid back inside a quarter, and continues to pay back today.
Internal write-up
Read the internal write-up on how the team was built
Rithin's own account of the hiring model, the interview process and the operating cadence that made the Hyderabad team productive from week one.
