How ParkMobile Replaced Agency Developers with 9 In-House LatAm Engineers and Saved Over $1M

The Challenge

ParkMobile is part of Arrive, a leading global mobility platform. Their parking app is trusted in over 4,200 cities across 21 countries, helping millions of people find and manage parking with ease.

ParkMobile’s back-end and platform work had been handled by developers from third-party agencies for years.

Mariana Lepassar, Head of Engineering for Mobile Payments and Billing, could see the problem: “From a business viability perspective, it creates a huge risk for us.”

She wanted to hire their own platform engineers, backend developers, and an iOS specialist.

US rates ($148K to $214K per role) were off the table. Colombia had come up as a lower-cost market worth piloting, but ParkMobile had never recruited there before.

“We didn’t know the labor market,” Akshay Gokarnakar, ParkMobile’s TA Lead, said. “We were struggling to get the jobs up and running.”

But they knew if the first roles failed, Colombia could lose credibility internally as a viable engineering hub.

The success of these initial roles is very crucial for the business. And the bar was high. ParkMobile wasn’t looking for developers to execute tickets.

As Mariana put it, “We don’t want to hire junior developers. We really need senior engineers who are able to think along with the product strategy.”

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Concerns vs. What Actually Happened

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Two months after the first placements, Akshay wrote:

Hire With Near works today as a valued extension of our internal team, which speaks to their strong partnership approach.

A Few of the Senior Engineers ParkMobile Hired

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Results

ParkMobile set out to replace agency-dependent engineering with a permanent, in-house team in Colombia. Hire With Near handled sourcing, English screening, and candidate management inside ParkMobile’s own ATS, delivering results on speed, cost, and team quality.

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Understanding what our hiring managers need, that’s something you’ve cracked.

Those results came from more than fast sourcing. Hire With Near screened for what ParkMobile’s hiring managers were going to test: whether a candidate could reason through tradeoffs, communicate under pressure, and own product work independently.

The result was a strong shortlist of engineers who could perform from day one.

And they kept performing once they were in.

As Akshay put it,

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After ParkMobile’s B2B leadership saw what the team was delivering, they expanded the program and began hiring team leads in Colombia.

Akshay Gokarnakar wrote on G2:

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What’s Next?

Because the first hires delivered, Colombia’s future inside ParkMobile was secure. When ParkMobile’s broader engineering organization began evaluating other global hiring locations, Colombia held its ground. Other divisions saw the results and pushed to hire there.

ParkMobile plans to hire the same volume again in 2026 and is exploring a legal entity and a physical office in Bogotá.

Hire With Near remains their lead hiring partner for Colombia.