A US-based sports operations platform

100% of NFL Teams Use This Platform. We Built Part of It.

Our client is a US-based sports operations platform. The product unifies talent acquisition, athlete development, game preparation, and operations for the elite sports organizations that use it. Coaches, athletes, performance staff, front offices, and administrators all work in the same system.

The customer list is the kind of list that doesn’t have many competitors on it. 100% of NFL teams. 90% of MLB. 90% of the English Premier League. 87% of the NBA. 83% of MLS. 81% of the NHL. 99% of NCAA Division I athletic departments. 65+ Olympic federations across 24 countries. 6,500+ elite sports teams globally.

The company is 18+ years old, headquartered in North Carolina, and has raised more than $411 million across 28 investors. Its most recent Series F closed in June 2025 at a pre-money valuation exceeding $1 billion.

EltexSoft contributed React Native and React engineering to this platform across a 2+ year engagement. The honest version of the story matters more than the trophies, so here it is.

How the Engagement Started

The client came to us through a referral. They didn’t put us on the main product on day one. They put us on a child product — a nutrition app for athletes, one of several specialized applications inside their broader ecosystem.

That initial engagement ran 3 to 6 months. The codebase was well-organized. The client had strong QA discipline and a serious approach to code review. The work was feature development, bug fixes, and product polish on a mature codebase.

We did the work well. After that engagement, the client invited us to contribute to the main platform.

This is how trust gets earned in agency work. You don’t get put on the highest-stakes part of a customer’s product on day one. You get put on something smaller, you deliver, and the scope expands. Most of our longest engagements started this way.

What We Did on the Main Platform

EltexSoft’s role on the main platform was straightforward and we won’t pretend it was more than it was.

We provided two engineers as React Native and React capacity inside the client’s engineering organization. The model was team augmentation. Our engineers sat in the client’s Slack and Jira, joined their sprints, followed their conventions, and submitted pull requests to their repositories.

The work was feature development across the React Native mobile applications (iOS and Android), the React web frontend, and accessibility improvements that the product was prioritizing during our engagement. We did not own a discrete module that ships under “this section was built by EltexSoft.” We were part of a larger engineering team contributing to a continuously evolving product.

What this looks like in practice: a client PM or engineering lead picks up a ticket, scopes it, and assigns it. The work goes to whoever has the bandwidth and the right context, which might be a full-time employee in North Carolina, a contractor in Prague, or one of our engineers in Ukraine. The pull request goes through the same review process either way. The user shipping the feature doesn’t care where the engineer sits.

Why This Engagement Pattern Works

A meaningful share of the world’s best engineering organizations operate this way. They hire full-time staff for the core architectural work and the senior engineering leadership. They augment with vetted external engineers for delivery capacity that scales with the roadmap. They don’t outsource the product. They outsource the additional throughput.

Our client is one of those organizations. Their product team includes former professional athletes hired into engineering, QA, and product roles — people who understand the operational problems the product solves because they lived inside them. That kind of domain expertise lives inside the company, not in any vendor.

What augmentation engineers like ours provide is delivery capacity. We accelerate the roadmap. We don’t shape the product strategy.

We will tell you when an engagement fits this pattern and when it doesn’t. For a mature organization with opinionated tech leadership and a product owned and shaped entirely in-house, team augmentation is the right model. For a client where the product needs to be recovered from scratch and there’s no internal engineering organization, full outsourcing is the right model. The vendor’s job is to know which is which.

The Stack

The platform stack our engineers worked across:

Mobile: React Native for iOS and Android, with a shared codebase between platforms.

Web: React with TypeScript.

Backend: Python services (we did not work on the backend, but it was the runtime adjacent to our work).

Integrations: Firebase for analytics and notifications. Feature flag tooling (Statsig or similar) for controlled rollouts.

The codebase was well-organized, with the kind of structure and conventions that come from a product that’s been worked on by a serious engineering team for years. The harder engineering challenge was less about novel architecture and more about working effectively inside a mature system: understanding the patterns already in place, matching them in new code, and improving accessibility and performance without disrupting what already worked.

The Engagement at a Glance

Duration: 2+ years.

Engagement model: team augmentation, working directly inside the client’s engineering organization.

Team size: 2 engineers.

Roles: React Native and React frontend/mobile engineers. No separate tech lead from EltexSoft. Our engineers reported into the client’s engineering management.

Communication: Direct integration into the client’s Slack and Jira. One-week sprints (Monday through Friday). 5+ hour timezone overlap with the client’s distributed team across the US, Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique software engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

This engagement is one of several sports tech and venture-backed clients we’ve worked with. We also build for FinTech, LegalTech, HealthTech, EdTech, and FoodTech. Our tech stacks include Laravel, Django, React, Vue, iOS, Android, and AI engineering with LangChain and RAG.

We work in three engagement models: team augmentation (the pattern described above: senior engineers embedded in your team), dedicated team (a self-contained pod with a tech lead), and full outsourcing (we own the product). We’ll tell you honestly which one fits your situation.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

30-minute technical call. Bring your roadmap, your team gaps, or your build vs. buy question. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

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