Brigada is the engineering team of record behind Oly Care — one product for healthcare staffing agencies that does credentialing, shift operations, payroll and compliance, in place of the six separate tools agencies used to stitch together.
The problem: six tools and data that was stale on arrival
Healthcare staffing agencies were running on a stack of six products: an applicant tracking system, a credentialing tracker, a scheduler, a payroll provider, an invoicer, and a compliance dashboard. Each one held its own copy of the same nurses, shifts and clients.
Six copies of the truth means none of them is current. By the time a credential update or a shift change had made its way from one tool to the next, the data was stale before it reached the admin who had to act on it.
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One data model, one product team
We took on the whole surface area rather than a slice of it. One data model underneath candidates, credentials, shifts, payroll and compliance, so a change in one place is a change everywhere. One product team owning all of it, so there is nobody to hand the problem to.
That is the decision the rest of the product hangs off. An integration between six tools is six sets of failure modes. A single model has one.
A payroll engine built from scratch
The hardest part was payroll. No off-the-shelf payroll option fitted the agency tax model, so we built the payroll engine ourselves rather than bending the business to a provider that did not understand it.
Building payroll is not a decision you take lightly: it is the part of the product where a bug costs someone their wages. Owning it means payroll reads from the same data model as the shifts and credentials, instead of from an export of them.
Launched in ten weeks, then weekly releases
The first version went live ten weeks after kickoff and replaced the six-tool stack for every pilot agency. Since then the product has shipped on a weekly release rhythm, which keeps each change small enough to reason about in a system that pays people.
Kubernetes on AWS, chosen rather than defaulted to
Our bias is towards the smallest infrastructure that meets the real availability requirement. On Oly Care that genuinely is Kubernetes on AWS, with PostgreSQL underneath and Stripe — not because it looks good on a diagram, but because the product needs it.
On a retainer we live with our own architectural decisions rather than handing them over and leaving, which is a strong incentive to make them carefully. The DevOps and cloud work is ours as well as the application code.
How the engagement runs
Oly Care has a dedicated Brigada team: a named group working only on the product, in its standups and its tooling, as the engineering team of record on a multi-year retainer. Laravel and Vue 3 with Inertia on the application side.
We work from Prishtinë on Central European Time, an hour ahead of the UK, which in practice is the whole working day in common.
Where it stands
Oly Care is live, replaced the six-tool stack for every pilot agency, and Brigada is now the engineering backbone of a growing SaaS business. Built and run by a dedicated Brigada team; the product is at oly.care.
Oly Care — frequently asked
- What is Oly Care?
- Oly Care is a healthcare staffing platform for agencies: candidate credentialing, a shift marketplace, payroll and compliance in one product, replacing a stack of six separate tools.
- Who built Oly Care?
- Brigada.dev, a software studio in Prishtinë, Kosovo. Brigada is the engineering team of record on a multi-year retainer, with a dedicated team on the product.
- Why build a payroll engine instead of using a provider?
- No off-the-shelf payroll option fitted the agency tax model, so the payroll engine was built from scratch on the same data model as shifts and credentials.
- What does Oly Care run on?
- Laravel, Vue 3 and Inertia, PostgreSQL and Stripe, deployed on AWS with Kubernetes.
- Web developmentLaravel and Vue product platforms, built data model first.
- DevOps & cloudThe AWS and Kubernetes work underneath Oly Care.
- IT outsourcing in KosovoHow a dedicated Brigada team is staffed and run.