ETAProjects is scaling up with over 30 new developer hires, strengthening its backend, AI, and product infrastructure teams for Whistlr
A Major Talent Shift Begins at ETAPX
ETAProjects Inc. (ETAPX), the East Bay tech company behind the Whistlr ecosystem, has officially expanded its engineering team with the onboarding of 30+ new developers — marking the largest single hiring phase in the company’s history. The new hires span mobile, backend, frontend, AI, DevOps, and system architecture, positioning ETAPX to execute on a high-volume, high-velocity roadmap across its flagship products: Whistlr, Whistlr+, and its proprietary AI engine.
While many tech companies are in retreat, ETAPX is in motion.
The expansion reflects not only a doubling-down on product delivery, but a strategic shift in how the company approaches infrastructure. It’s no longer just building to iterate — it’s building to scale.
Why Now? A New Phase in the Whistlr Ecosystem
The decision to expand the engineering team was not made lightly. For the past two years, ETAPX operated with a lean development model — a small core team pushing weekly builds, late-night bug fixes, and all-hands sprints across the mobile app, video engine, and backend moderation systems. That startup efficiency paid off, leading to the successful launch of Whistlr, the recent rollout of Whistlr+, and the quiet development of a custom AI platform designed for social media infrastructure.
But now, the stakes are different.
As Whistlr’s user base scales across Gen Z college networks and creator communities, and as Whistlr+ gains traction with content-first users, the need for sustained velocity, feature branching, and specialized architecture became non-negotiable.
ETAPX isn’t hiring to fill seats. It’s hiring to unblock momentum — and to keep the innovation pipeline moving without bottlenecking engineering cycles.
The Hiring Strategy: Technical Excellence Meets Cultural Fit
This expansion wasn’t about outsourcing or ramping up volume for the sake of speed. Every developer brought into the company was vetted not just on skillset, but on alignment with ETAPX’s technical vision and cultural DNA.
New hires were onboarded through a mix of direct recruitment, vetted referrals, and invitation-only dev trials. The hiring funnel focused on engineers with experience in:
- Building scalable Firebase + Google Cloud apps
- Developing real-time media workflows (including vertical video and livestreaming)
- AI model training, vector clustering, and moderation algorithms
- CI/CD pipelines tailored for mobile deployment (iOS + Android)
- Working within GetX, Bloc, and MVC controller architectures for Flutter
- Scaling social platforms from 10k to 10 million+ users
The final cohort represents a mix of senior engineers, mid-level builders, and product-minded developers who understand that in startups, execution trumps ego.
Just as important as the code, however, is the culture. Each hire was screened for product empathy, creative flexibility, and a clear ability to work inside fast feedback loops — not waterfall timelines.
More importantly, the team now includes global coverage. Developers have been brought on from across the U.S., Canada, Pakistan, India, and parts of Eastern Europe — with coordinated sprint hours and assigned verticals to avoid time zone sprawl and broken handoffs.
How the New Engineering Org Is Structured
To support this new headcount, ETAPX restructured its development org into five core pods:
- Core Infrastructure Pod — Maintains and scales the backend logic for user data, post delivery, analytics ingestion, and content flagging.
- Mobile Product Pod — Handles Flutter development across Whistlr and Whistlr+ for both iOS and Android, including UI flows, camera handling, and notifications.
- AI Systems Pod — Focuses on the in-house machine learning model, training clusters, behavioral analytics, and custom moderation logic.
- Video + Live Pod — Dedicated to livestream functionality, video uploads, Whistlr+ vertical feed systems, Bunny.net streaming integrations, and upcoming monetization tools.
- DevOps & Reliability Pod — Oversees deployment health, testing pipelines, crash reporting, and developer infrastructure to support the velocity of continuous deployment.
Each pod operates semi-autonomously, with a pod lead reporting into the CTO and working closely with product management and creative leads.
The next section will dive deeper into how this engineering expansion is already impacting the product roadmap and what this scale-up means for user experience, moderation performance, and future innovation.
The Impact on Whistlr’s Core Product Development
With the new engineering teams now active, Whistlr’s core platform is already evolving at a faster, more deliberate pace. What used to be a bottlenecked pipeline of one-feature-at-a-time dev work has now become a multi-track roadmap with weekly deployments, concurrent beta testing, and layered product rollout cycles.
One of the immediate outcomes of the hiring surge was the replatforming of Whistlr’s backend logic — especially around how content is served and filtered. Previously, engagement-based discovery fed trending tabs, but now the product team is layering in sentiment clusters, repost-based ranking, and location-temporal behavior analysis to create a more vibe-driven feed.
Real-time comment threading, threaded responses, in-app reactions, and updated repost logic are now being built in parallel — all coordinated across dedicated branches that operate without stepping on each other. The app is no longer sprinting toward a single deadline. It’s shipping like an ecosystem.
On the visual side, new hires are helping to elevate the user experience across multiple fronts:
- Feed rendering speed is improving across lower-end Androids and older iPhones
- New navigation logic for swiping across tabs is smoother, more fluid, and less memory-intensive
- Hashtag discovery and trending clusters are now being recalibrated with a feedback loop driven by new backend intelligence systems
- Matchmaking (WildDraw) logic is being re-architected to include real-time filters, follower history, and interest overlap — all powered by event triggers
These features would’ve taken months with a skeleton crew. Now, they’re shipping in weeks.
Whistlr+ Evolves From MVP to Full Platform
The expansion also dramatically affects Whistlr+, the creator-facing vertical video product that launched in public beta earlier this year. What was once a minimally viable interface has become the foundation for an entirely new creator economy within the Whistlr ecosystem.
With the new hires, ETAPX is now rolling out:
- A swipeable vertical feed with real-time loading and low-friction channel transitions
- Creator channels that support custom branding, playlists, and content series
- Private-post visibility settings to help creators control audience access
- A backend scheduling system for planned content drops, including time-gated releases and co-drops between creators
- An internal performance engine that maps viewing time, replay rates, and engagement spread — feeding back into the Whistlr+ creator dashboard (currently in alpha)
More importantly, a specialized team from the new hires is working exclusively on video delivery optimization using Bunny.net and Google Cloud. The goal is to reduce latency, eliminate buffering under load, and keep video quality sharp across all screen sizes.
Whistlr+ is no longer a feature. It’s a standalone content layer — and the engineering team is scaling it like one.
Developer Workflows Have Been Rebuilt From the Ground Up
Before the hiring wave, much of Whistlr’s dev work was done via manual builds, limited testing frameworks, and a just-make-it-work pipeline. That changed quickly.
The DevOps pod, one of the most critical teams formed in this expansion, has since introduced:
- End-to-end testing via automated emulators and test devices on both Android and iOS
- Pull request templates that enforce code review, architecture docs, and logic explanations
- Pre-deployment crash checks across major devices to ensure 95%+ stability in all environments
- Cloud Function monitoring with real-time logging and failover alerts tied directly into Slack
- A staging environment for internal beta testers, allowing features to be rolled out to staff and select creators weeks before public deployment
This kind of workflow engineering doesn’t just improve velocity — it builds trust. It allows the product team to take bigger risks without breaking the entire app. And it ensures that the platform can grow sustainably, without shipping half-finished features to a user base that’s rapidly scaling.
Team Health and Burnout Prevention Are Key
In fast-growing startups, hiring is often followed by burnout, culture rot, or talent churn. ETAPX is working to avoid that by embedding team health into the operating structure from day one.
New hires are integrated through structured onboarding sessions that walk through the company’s roadmap, vision, and technical ecosystem. They’re then assigned to pods with clearly scoped expectations, work/life guardrails, and a peer mentor inside their vertical.
Sprints are built around achievable feature goals — not pressure cookers. Demos are short, informal, and focused on progress, not polish. And managers are held accountable for creating culture stability, not just code velocity.
The result is a fast-moving, deeply invested engineering team that ships at scale — without running on fumes.
