Smile Train – IT Recruitment for a Global Children’s Charity

Tsiala Jobava

Last updated on September 25, 2026 | 9 min read

• Three engineering roles filled for Smile Train’s global cleft-care platform, all placed within roughly two months from first outreach to signed contracts.
• Search pivoted from Colombia to Mexico after an English proficiency gap surfaced, where every hire cleared the B2 language threshold the team required.

Introduction

When a global children’s health organization needed to strengthen the engineering team behind a cloud-based platform serving programs across 90+ countries, it turned for help to DevsData LLC. Three roles were open: Software Developer, Software Architect, and QA Engineer. The search began in Colombia, ran into a consistent English proficiency gap across the candidate pool, and was redirected to Mexico, where all three profiles were found. From the first outreach to signed contracts, the process took approximately two months.

Client overview

Smile Train is a New York-based international children’s charity founded in 1999. The organization works exclusively on cleft care, operating through a model built around local medical professionals who receive training, funding, and resources to deliver treatment in their own communities. This approach allows Smile Train to provide care 365 days a year, rather than relying on periodic visiting medical teams.

Over more than two decades, the organization has supported quality surgery and comprehensive cleft care. Local partner clinics go beyond surgery to provide speech therapy, psychological support, nutritional services, and orthodontic care. Smile Train employs around 200 people and operates from New York City.

Behind that operating model sits a cloud-based platform that coordinates clinical activity across more than 90 countries. The system links partner clinics into a single source of program data, runs on AWS, and is built on a Java and Spring Boot backend with PostgreSQL handling the underlying clinical and operational records. Engineering responsibility rests with a small in-house platform team that owns architecture decisions, deployment quality, and the day-to-day reliability that field operations depend on.

Hiring challenge

The three roles sat inside a small platform engineering team responsible for maintaining and evolving the cloud-based system that coordinates Smile Train’s work across partner clinics worldwide. The platform tracks surgical programs in each region, processes data tied to care delivery, and connects field operations with the central organization, which means any downtime or instability directly affects how children receive treatment. Strengthening the engineering team behind it was a precondition for scaling the charity’s reach without compromising the reliability partners depend on. The Software Developer would work across the stack of the existing platform, contributing to feature delivery and the day-to-day stability of the system that partner clinics rely on. The Software Architect would own technical direction for the platform, defining standards and guiding modernization decisions. The QA Engineer would be responsible for testing coverage, deployment validation, and maintaining code quality before production releases.

Across all three roles, the communication requirement was equally demanding. The team coordinated directly with architects, Product Managers, and external partners. Each hire would need to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, participate in design discussions, and contribute to sprint planning. Professional working English at B2 or above was a firm condition on every position.

DevsData LLC opened the search in Colombia. The country has a growing developer community with real depth in Java and cloud technologies, and early sourcing confirmed that technically qualified profiles existed across all three role types. At the language screening stage, the picture changed. Candidates were consistently rated at A1 to B1 proficiency levels, which covers basic comprehension and structured exchanges but falls well short of the fluency these roles demanded. Continuing in that market would have extended the timeline without changing the outcome.

Our approach

Mexico’s technology sector is concentrated across Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, and its developer community has a higher rate of English exposure than many comparable Latin American markets. This stems from sustained commercial integration with the US and a larger share of companies operating in English-language environments. That higher rate of English exposure made Mexico the logical next market.

DevsData LLC carried the same technical screening criteria forward from the Colombia phase and added one significant change: English proficiency assessment was moved to the front of the evaluation process rather than treated as a late-stage check.

Any candidate who did not demonstrate B2 or above in live conversation was not advanced, regardless of how strong their technical profile was. This gate prevented the team from running full interview cycles on candidates who would not clear the client’s language standard.

Running parallel searches for roles this different in seniority and function is the kind of brief that exposes whether a recruitment partner has real cross-functional capability or only a single specialism. DevsData LLC built each evaluation track around the specific demands of the position rather than applying one generic engineering screen across the board.

For the Software Developer, the technical evaluation covered Java and Spring Boot in depth, AWS service experience across ECS, RDS, S3, and Lambda, RESTful API design, and CI/CD familiarity. The Software Architect assessment focused on platform design decisions, cloud-native architecture patterns, and the ability to lead technical discussions with both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders. QA evaluation examined testing methodology, experience with deployment pipelines, and structured thinking around quality assurance in a continuously evolving platform environment. Communication assessments ran across all four tracks, looking at how candidates handled both technical explanations and cross-functional discussions.

Execution and delivery

The Colombia phase, initial sourcing and language screening, surfaced the proficiency gap, at which point the search was redirected to Mexico. Once Mexico became the active market, the structured evaluation framework meant the shortlisting phase moved at pace across all three roles simultaneously. Candidates who passed both the language gate and role-specific technical assessments were submitted to Smile Train for review, with interview coordination managed closely to keep the process moving without gaps between stages.

DevsData LLC designs its cross-border recruitment workflows to hold up under exactly this kind of market shift, with standardized scoring and assessment criteria that travel cleanly between countries without losing the consistency clients rely on.

All three specialists joined Smile Train under full-time formal employment contracts, working fully remotely.

The total time from first outreach to signed contracts was approximately two months. On the DevsData LLC side, the engagement was handled by a dedicated recruitment lead who ran sourcing and client coordination, supported by two technical recruiters focused on Java and cloud profiles, a language assessor certified for CEFR-based evaluation, and an account manager who handled the pivot conversations with Smile Train.

A meaningful share of the value sat in the advisory layer rather than the execution layer. The same team had visibility into compensation benchmarks for senior Java and cloud engineering profiles in both Colombia and Mexico, fed real-time hiring market data into the conversation with Smile Train when the pivot decision was on the table, and translated language proficiency distributions across the two candidate pools into a recommendation the client could act on with confidence. Running three parallel searches increased coordination complexity, while the pivot introduced additional steps that a single-market search would not require. Redirecting early, rather than continuing in Colombia in search of outliers, prevented further delays in the overall timeline.

Outcome

DevsData LLC closed three technically demanding roles for Smile Train with specialists who met both the engineering requirements and the communication standard the team needed. Profiles behind the placements tell the fit story clearly. The Software Developer is a backend engineer with production Java and Spring Boot credentials on AWS infrastructure, whose prior role mirrored the technology stack they now own at Smile Train.

The Software Architect is a seasoned platform designer whose body of work lines up with the charity’s need for coherent technical direction across a system serving dozens of countries. The QA Engineer comes from a regulated software environment where automated test coverage and pre-production validation gates were treated as hard requirements, which is exactly what Smile Train’s operational continuity demands. All three candidates came from Mexico and cleared the B2 language threshold that had been the defining constraint of the search from the outset. They stepped into their roles ready to contribute from week one. The weight of this outcome goes beyond three filled seats. It positions the team behind Smile Train’s global platform to move from maintenance into real evolution, which directly supports the charity’s ability to extend cleft care to more children in more regions. This is the caliber of cross-border placement DevsData LLC has built its practice around.

The engagement reflected a broader reality in Latin American recruitment: English proficiency is not uniform across the region, and the gap between markets is real and consequential for roles where communication is central to the work. Treating language assessment as an early-stage filter across all three searches, rather than a final formality, is what allowed the process to resolve within a reasonable timeframe rather than stall across two markets.

About DevsData LLC

DevsData LLC is a technology recruitment agency and software development consultancy with offices in Brooklyn and Warsaw, and regional partners across Latin America, Europe, and beyond. The company holds a 5/5 rating on Clutch and GoodFirms and operates on a success-based fee model with a guarantee period included on every placement.

Considering a LATAM search for Java, AWS, or platform engineering roles where language standards have to be non-negotiable? The Smile Train engagement reflects the standard way our team approaches that brief, from early market assessment to B2-level spoken screening integrated into the first evaluation stage. Contact general@devsdata.com to start a conversation about your hiring need, or visit www.devsdata.com for more on our practice.

Discover how IT recruitment and staffing can address your talent needs. Explore trending regions like Poland, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil and more.

🗓️ Schedule a consultation

Read full bio

Tsiala Jobava Copywriter and Marketer

Tsiala Jobava is a talented marketing specialist. Tsiala holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and a master’s in Marketing and Communication from Barcelona Business School. She has built a diverse career, working as a Copywriter and in marketing and PR, before returning to her first passion – writing. Along the way, she has gained valuable experience in social media management, content creation, and brand development.

Read more about our IT staffing services