Nubla

The challenge

Mobile gaming has an audience that looks nothing like any single country, so for Nubla to lead in gaming tech, the team decided early that internal diversity was a product requirement rather than a values statement. “We realised we needed that range inside Nubla to understand who we are building for,” says Inês Almeida, People Operations Lead at Nubla.

That meant a distributed team — today, 31 nationalities across 19 countries on five continents.

The mix is the part of the job Inês likes most. It is also the part that gets complicated: she is responsible for everyone outside Portugal, and “there is a great deal to know about a great many countries.” For a People team of three, compliance was the constant drag, and researching legislation ate whole weeks that should have gone to hiring.

“When it comes to the hard parts, it is nearly always compliance. We simply don’t hold that knowledge — which laws apply, what has changed, what a contract has to say. Benefits too: with this many countries we can’t do it ourselves. Take health insurance. If I had to research health cover country by country, that would be most of my week, every week.”

Nubla also had no infrastructure for employing people properly elsewhere. “We have entities in Portugal and Spain, and nowhere else,” Inês explains. Even where direct hiring was possible, onboarding meant a fortnight of paperwork before anyone could start.

Finally, contractors carried a quiet cost of their own. The company was competing for senior engineers against studios offering salaried roles with pensions and health cover, and it kept losing them at the offer stage.

These are the constraints that pushed Nubla to look for an employment partner rather than another workaround.

The solution

Nubla chose Halden as its global employment partner in March 2024, on the strength of country coverage and the ability to hire full-time employees compliantly — including in markets where standing up an entity would never be justified by two or three hires.

For Inês, Halden is a trustworthy partner that keeps them compliant against local requirements, whether that is a 13th-month salary in Portugal, notice periods in Brazil, or mandatory private cover in India. She describes the shift as being able to hire without first proving that hiring is legal.

“One of the upsides of working with Halden is the clarity,” she says. “Everything is on the platform. We just enter the information, and Halden takes it from there — I know exactly where a case is.”

When it comes to benefits, Halden is the answer to a problem the team could not solve internally. Nubla can now lean on localised benefits packages without having to research every market, and can count on a seamless employee experience for people joining anywhere.

“All we have to do now is approve. What used to take four weeks of back-and-forth with three advisers now takes an afternoon,” Inês says.

As a busy People Ops lead, Inês values fast, clear customer support. “They reply, and they reply with an answer. Being able to ask a question and get something specific back — rather than a link to a help centre — matters more than people think.”

“The thing that stood out for me in the relationship is having a named Customer Success Manager. We make a lot of things happen that might seem complicated at first. I can reach out if there are questions or problems, and there is always someone there who will help me straight away.”

Halden’s support is not limited to People and HR, either. It extends to the team members themselves. When one engineer relocated mid-contract with a set of personal concerns about the move, the Halden team walked them through it — “which made our team member comfortable moving, and confident it was the right step,” says Inês.

The results

For Nubla, the biggest change is that they can now hire the person they want, wherever that person happens to live. If someone is right for the role, the location conversation is a formality rather than a veto.

“Nubla is where it is because we hire good people,” Inês says. “If we see a talent now, we don’t need to think twice. Onboarding is quick and it feels the same whether the person is in Porto or Pune.”

With Halden as a partner, Nubla currently has people in Brazil, India, Pakistan, Italy, Poland, Türkiye and the U.K. Some of those hires were on offer letters within a fortnight of first contact.

“With Halden, we can employ talent from anywhere in the world, which brings us the diversity we were looking for. The biggest change is the diversity of countries and of the people we work with,” Inês adds. “It has also let us hire from a smaller pool of very specialised engineers — the ones who are only ever going to be in three or four places.”

Even while hiring far more widely, Nubla has peace of mind on compliance, since the paperwork is handled by experts who know the specifics locally. They also feel able to speak plainly to candidates about the offer, because they know what it contains.

“The time saved by not looking into legislation, into contracts, but leaving it to someone who is an expert within that specific country — that makes my life a lot easier.”

By leaving the admin to Halden, Inês can focus on more impactful work: a hiring plan with a pulse, better onboarding, and a real sense of belonging across time zones.

“Engagement, retention, training — these are things that usually fall behind when a People team is firefighting. We have those back. And I would never have thought I would be able to say that with people spread across this many countries.”

What comes next

Looking ahead, Inês wants to keep widening where Nubla hires. The team has also started examining contractor classification across its remaining freelance roster, and how to reduce that exposure before it becomes a problem.

“How we came to Halden in the first place is that we worked with contractors, and we realised that in the long term — and in terms of risk — that could not hold. Halden has been very good at explaining what the exposure actually is, country by country. I’m glad to be working through the contractor relationships properly rather than hoping nobody asks.”