The Partner: Monalee
Monalee is a technology company building the digital backbone for the future of energy. Its flagship product, Artemis, is the AI-first operating system for home energy, used by contractors to sell, finance, install, and service solar, batteries, EV chargers, and more. What used to take weeks and multiple disjointed tools now takes under a minute.
As utilities face $250B+ in annual grid spending and struggle to meet growing demand from AI and EVs, Artemis empowers a new generation of decentralized energy providers with the speed, intelligence, and scale to turn every home into a node of the new energy internet.
Scaling that kind of platform, and supporting the contractors who depend on it, requires strong engineering velocity and hands-on customer success capacity. Monalee partnered with South to add both, fast, without absorbing U.S. senior engineering payroll.
The Challenge: Scale Engineering and Customer Success in Parallel, Fast
Category-defining SaaS platforms face a familiar tension: ship product fast enough to stay ahead of the market, while giving customers the technical support they need to actually adopt and expand.
Monalee needed to move on both fronts at once:
- Add senior full-stack engineering firepower to keep the roadmap moving
- Add technically strong customer success capacity to onboard contractors, troubleshoot integrations, and make sure customers realize value from the platform
- Do it without piling on U.S. senior engineering and CS engineering salaries, which would compress margins and slow further hiring
- And do it fast, before the recruiting gap started to bottleneck product velocity and customer growth
Hiring these three roles in the U.S. would have added over $31K/month to payroll, and would likely have taken months, not weeks. Monalee turned to South to build the team from LATAM instead.
The Roles
- Senior Full Stack Engineer
- Customer Success Engineer (Mid-Level)
- Customer Success Engineer (Senior)
The South Solution: A Full Team, Sourced End-to-End in 25 Days
South managed the full hiring process across all three roles and closed the entire team in 25 days:
- LATAM sourcing across engineering and customer success engineering talent pools
- Technical vetting calibrated to Monalee’s stack and standards
- Seniority calibration (1 Senior FS Engineer, 1 Mid CS Engineer, 1 Senior CS Engineer)
- English proficiency evaluation for customer-facing roles
- Compliance, contracting, and payroll setup
The 25-day timeline meant Monalee’s roadmap and customer onboarding didn’t lose momentum waiting on recruiting. Within under a month, the company had a layered, immediately productive team: engineering horsepower for the platform, plus the technical customer success capacity to make sure that platform actually lands with the contractors deploying it in the field.
The Results: A Full 3-Person Team in 25 Days at ~40% Below U.S. Cost
Cost Structure That Keeps ClimateTech Growth Sustainable
That translates to $150,000 in annual savings, a ~40% reduction in payroll costs for the full engineering and customer success expansion, with no compromise on seniority or technical bar.
Speed That Protected Product Velocity
By closing all three roles in 25 days, South removed the recruiting bottleneck entirely.
A Partnership Built to Last
The real proof isn’t the hiring speed, it’s what happens after. The three engineers South placed at Monalee are still embedded in the platform and the customer success function today, driving product velocity and customer outcomes as the company scales.
For a ClimateTech company operating in a fast-moving market with a demanding technical bar, that kind of stability is what turns a hiring transaction into a long-term talent strategy.
Monalee built a 3-person engineering and CS team in 25 days, saved $150K annually, and the entire team is still driving impact today. Schedule a free call with South and see how we can build your team.