Building a distributed R&D center from zero

Clicktale needed to grow engineering faster than the Israeli market could hire. The answer was a second R&D site, and I was the one who built it.

Standing it up

I established a high-performance engineering center in Kyiv, partnering with Ciklum on the ground. I recruited 14 developers and 3 team leads, interviewing to the same bar we held in Tel Aviv rather than lowering it to fill seats faster. A remote center that ships second-rate work is worse than no center at all. It becomes a place the real work quietly routes around.

Making two sites one team

The hard part of distributed engineering is not the code, it is the seams. I set up the collaboration processes that let Israel and Ukraine operate as a single group instead of a headquarters and an outpost:

• Shared ownership, not handoffs. Kyiv teams owned services end to end, with real on-call and real authority, so nobody waited on Tel Aviv to make decisions about systems they ran.
• One set of standards. Same code-review bar, same definition of done, same expectations in both time zones. Standards that bend by location stop being standards.
• Overlap that respects people. Enough scheduled overlap to stay in sync, protected focus time outside it, and decisions written down so the timezone gap never became an information gap.

What it became

The Kyiv center grew into the foundation of the company's distributed engineering organization. It is the clearest proof I have of something I still believe: scaling a system is a people problem first. Get the team and the ownership right, and the architecture follows.