01
Staff augmentation
Senior engineers embedded in your team. Your tools, your codebase, your sprints. We manage sourcing, onboarding, and continuity so your internal team can stay focused on shipping.
Boutique agency. Senior talent. No shortcuts.
San José, Costa Rica. Since 2015, we have built software for growth-stage companies and embedded senior engineers inside product teams that need to ship.
Studio
A focused agency built around senior engineering and long-term client relationships.
Alfredo and Esteban founded 5e Creative Labs in San José in 2015. Over eleven years we have grown into a boutique agency with a senior-weighted team of designers, developers, and strategists — all working directly on client projects.
Our core offering is staff augmentation: placing senior engineers inside product and engineering teams at growth-stage companies. We handle sourcing, continuity, and performance. Our clients get experienced people contributing from week one, without the four-month hiring cycle.
We also take on custom projects end-to-end — from product strategy and design through development and launch. Over thirty clients are on monthly retainers, some for years. Retention is the metric we care about most.
Based in Costa Rica, we operate in the CST time zone — one hour from most US East Coast cities, two from the West Coast. We are in your standups, on your Slack, and shipping on your schedule.
Working with us
How We Engage
02
Custom project
From brief to launch. We handle product strategy, UX/UI design, and full-stack development. Fixed scope or iterative — we adapt to how your team works.
03
Consulting
Architecture reviews, vendor evaluations, technical discovery. When you need experienced eyes on a problem before committing to a build.
By the numbers
Track record
80+
Projects delivered
11
Years in business
30+
Active retainer clients
CST
Time zone
Methodology
How We Work
01
Ideation
We start by understanding the problem — not jumping to solutions. Goals, constraints, MVP scope, and the reasoning behind each decision get locked in here. Most projects succeed or fail at this stage.
02
Design
Wireframes become working prototypes. We validate the product direction before writing a line of code. Navigation, flows, and edge cases get resolved here — not discovered mid-sprint.
03
Development
Agile sprints with visible progress and constant feedback loops. You see what we are building and why. We deliver working software iteratively, not in a big reveal at the end.
04
Testing & Quality
Every build goes through functional testing, stress testing, cross-device testing, and accessibility audits. We do not ship anything we would not stand behind.
05
Ongoing Support
Launched software needs continuous attention. We stay engaged for iterations, scaling, and maintenance — as a long-term retainer or on demand.
Culture
What we stand for
01
Senior-weighted on purpose. Our engineers have shipped production software at scale. Junior talent is great for learning — not for clients paying for velocity.
02
Direct communication, no filtering. You work with the people building your product. There is no account manager sitting between you and the team.
03
Accountability over availability. We tell you when something is wrong or off-track. Honest conversations early save months of wasted work.
04
CST time zone. We are one hour from New York, two from San Francisco. Real overlap, real standups, real collaboration.
05
Retention is our real metric. The average client relationship at 5e runs over two years. We build for what happens after launch.
06
Costa Rica is not a cost play — it is a talent play. The engineering community here is deep, technically strong, and professionally mature.
Selected clients
Looking to scale your engineering team?
We place senior engineers at growth-stage companies. Reach out and we will respond within one business day.