Sensei Labs CTO D’Arcy Rittich explains how global hiring helped the company scale its team, sharpen its candidate pipeline, and bring technical depth into the business.
When Sensei Labs was preparing for its next stage of growth, the company had a clear technical hiring challenge. The team had funding, a product to keep building, and customers to support, but the local hiring pipeline was not giving them the reach or speed they needed.
Its product, Conductor, helps enterprises manage large-scale initiatives such as mergers, manufacturing consolidation, inventory planning, and other complex transformation programs. For a product with that kind of scope, every technical hire needed to ramp into a broad environment and start contributing with context.
“We wanted to fairly rapidly hire on the technical side. The goal was to bring in “six to eight people pretty quickly, but we could not find a pipeline that worked locally. That is when we decided to try VanHack.”
From funding to a technical hiring bottleneck
At the time, the business was still early in its company journey. It had recently received funding, and the purpose of that funding was clear: scale the team, serve more customers, and continue building product capabilities.
The constraint was not demand. It was talent access.
D’Arcy describes the decision to work with VanHack as an answer to that bottleneck. The company needed technical people quickly, but it also needed the right people. For a product like Conductor, strong engineering ability was only part of the equation. New team members also had to understand broad product complexity, adapt to customer problems, and work well inside a growing company.
That partnership gave the team access to a broader international talent pool and a process built around candidates who were open to relocating to Canada.
A candidate pipeline that got sharper over time
For D’Arcy, one of the strongest parts of the hiring experience was not just the number of candidates. It was the way the pipeline improved.
“The best part of the hiring process for me is the fact that the pipeline continued to be refined,” he says. The first candidates were “in the ballpark,” but the hiring partner did not yet know the company’s culture or technical needs in depth. The value came through the back-and-forth.
As the team gave feedback, the candidate pool became more focused. The search sharpened around what the business actually needed.
That refinement mattered because it helped the team evaluate candidates more efficiently. Preliminary technical vetting gave the company a useful signal before the first interview.
Combined with the candidate’s resume, that early context helped the company “hit the ground running” in interviews and accelerate the evaluation process.
Relocation without the usual friction
International hiring often comes with a practical concern: relocation. For companies that have not done it before, moving someone across borders can feel like a major barrier.
That was one of D’Arcy’s unknowns at the beginning. He wondered what the quality of the candidates would be like, and how much work relocation would require.
In practice, both concerns became smaller once the company went through the process.
“VanHack really stewarded the relocation process really well,” D’Arcy says. In most cases, new hires were working remotely within a few weeks of being hired and relocating within a few months.
That timeline gave Sensei Labs a practical path: start getting value from new hires quickly, while still supporting their move to Canada.
The clearest metric: people grew quickly
When asked for outcomes, D’Arcy did not point to a traditional dashboard metric. He pointed to what happened after the hires joined the company: how quickly they earned trust, contributed to the product, and stepped into larger responsibilities.
“The probably the most telling metric is that almost everyone that we hired got a promotion pretty quickly. So they hit the ground running.”
That mattered because this was not a narrow product environment. Conductor had a large set of features and a broad enterprise use case. New hires had to understand the product, the customer problems, and the internal systems before they could make their full impact.
“It is not technically complicated, but it is very broad,” he says. “There is a lot to wrap your arms around.”
Once that threshold was crossed, the pattern became clear. D’Arcy says the hires started providing value quickly, and many were eager to take on more leadership roles.
“As a growing company we had lots of opportunity,” he says. “It was fantastic to be able to help people in their career, and they merited it.”
That is what made the outcome meaningful. The hires were not simply filling open seats. They were growing with the company, earning advancement, and helping the team build more capacity from the inside.
D’Arcy also noticed a strong sense of dedication to the work and the product. These were people who thought deeply about problems, cared about the craft, and brought experience from related sectors such as fintech.
For a CTO who has hired hundreds of people, that consistency mattered. “The quality was really uniform,” he says.
Why cultural depth strengthened the team
The impact of hiring internationally was not only technical.
D’Arcy says one of the most meaningful parts of the experience was welcoming people who brought their own cultures into the company. Instead of new employees simply adapting to the existing environment, the team had the opportunity to integrate with what they brought.
That made the organization stronger.
“The cultural infusion was really valuable,” he says. The new hires brought technical depth and strong work ethic, but they also brought perspectives that would have been harder to find through a purely local network.
D’Arcy connects that directly to the company’s Toronto context. In a city shaped by global cultures, building a team with people from different places felt like a natural extension of the environment around them.
The value is hard to reduce to a number, but it shows up in how a team thinks, collaborates, and connects with the world.
Advice for companies considering global hiring
D’Arcy’s advice to other companies is simple: stay in conversation with your recruiting partner.
The candidate pool improves when employers give clear feedback. The more a company explains what is working, what is missing, and what kind of person will succeed, the more refined the search becomes.
He also encourages companies not to be afraid of reviewing a larger number of candidates early in the process. That early volume can help the partner learn what the company actually needs.
The two biggest perceived barriers, candidate quality and relocation, were the same two areas where this hiring process delivered.
- Candidate quality became clearer as the pipeline was refined.
- Relocation became manageable with the right support and timeline.
For the company, those two pieces made international hiring a practical way to grow the team at a critical moment.
Finding the right partners along the way
As Sensei Labs scaled its technical team, it partnered with VanHack, a global platform that connects companies with vetted international tech talent, to expand beyond the limits of its local hiring pipeline.
The experience helped the business find candidates with technical depth, support relocation to Canada, and build a stronger team through global perspectives.
Their story reflects what many growing companies discover when they look beyond familiar networks: talent is everywhere, and the right hiring partner can help bring that talent into the team at the moment it matters most.
