About the client: Sears Home Services
Sears Home Services is one of the largest appliance repair, home warranty, and home service providers in the United States. They operate nationwide across all 50 states and multiple territories. With a scope that spans appliance repair, HVAC, home improvement, cleaning, and warranty services, Sears Home Services supports millions of households each year. Their nationwide in-home service network ensures reliable, high-quality repair and maintenance, making them a leader in keeping homes running smoothly. They needed a trusted solution for scaling engineering and a true technology partner to help them modernize.
The Challenge
Sears Home Services faced the need to modernize legacy systems, improve operational efficiency, and deliver faster, more reliable technology solutions to support both their workforce and customers. As a result, scaling engineering capacity at enterprise speed required a partner who could do more than provide staff augmentation; it demanded embedded, high-performing product squads capable of building and owning critical platforms.
Why Mission.dev
Mission.dev partnered with Sears Home Services as a true extension of their engineering function. Through fully embedded squads and managed services, Mission.dev provides end-to-end delivery capabilities, technical leadership, and scalable teams. Together, we help Sears Home Services accelerate digital transformation. We support their efforts to modernize core systems and create new efficiencies across supply chain and operations.
The partnership with Mission.dev
Sears Home Services faced a critical challenge: modernizing complex legacy systems while still delivering daily business operations with zero downtime. At the same time, they needed more than individual developers. To meet their goals, they required complete engineering squads that could deliver at scale. These teams have embed within the organization, and take ownership of critical platforms.
By partnering with Mission.dev, Sears Home Services gained a long-term technology partner that builds, grows, and manages high-performing engineering teams. What began as a traditional staff augmentation relationship soon evolved into Mission.dev’s team-as-a-service model. In this model, dedicated pods function as integrated product teams. Each pod supports multiple departments across the organization with a centralized staffing process and the flexibility to scale as priorities shift.
Central to the model are Mission.dev’s proprietary tools. Mission Match, ensures fast placement and exceptional vetting of top engineering talent, while Mission Signal, provides ongoing visibility into team performance and health. Together, these capabilities allow Sears Home Services to scale engineering capacity with speed, confidence, and consistency.
As one product leader described it:
“This is not staff augmentation in our case. It’s really team augmentation. We built something from the ground up, and we continue to maintain and expand it. A product is not a project; it’s living, it needs to be improved over time. That’s why we kept this team; they’re the best ones to maintain and grow the system they built.”
The partnership model
Mission.dev provided embedded pods that operate as complete product teams, not simply as additional headcount. Each pod owns a focused product or initiative and delivers end-to-end results across areas such as backend platforms and claims automation systems.
Mission.dev manages the full lifecycle of the relationship, including vetting, onboarding and offboarding, compliance, team management, and performance monitoring. This allows Sears Home Services’s leaders to focus on their business outcomes while Mission.dev ensures engineering excellence and operational reliability.
Today, Mission.dev functions as an extension of Sears Home Services’s engineering organization, enabling them to:
- Ship faster with developers placed quickly and features delivered in record time
- Increase quality through automated testing, strong documentation, and proven design patterns
- Boost productivity with pods that consistently outperform internal benchmarks
- Optimize costs by reducing churn, improving retention, and scaling resources efficiently
Pod in action: claims platform spotlight
The Claims Platform pod is driving the modernization of Sears Home Services’ claims processing system. The legacy platform was a black box with no documentation and limited access to data or its original developers, creating a major barrier to efficiency and innovation. Mission.dev’s embedded squad is building a modern, AI-powered in-house solution that delivers accurate, complete, and automated claim handling.
Despite short timelines and complex data migration requirements, the pod has built an MVP that combines business, process, and technology improvements. Working with a stack that includes Java Spring Boot, React, TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, AWS EKS, and PostgreSQL, the team is delivering a scalable system that reduces costs, minimizes manual errors, and prevents lost revenue. As Sears Home Services’s first AI-driven development initiative, the project is also establishing a blueprint for how innovation can be applied to other parts of the organization.
What comes next
Modernized systems, scaling engineering pods with senior talent, and a flexible partnership model are propelling Sears Home Services into its next phase of innovation. Mission.dev is proud to support their roadmap and remain a trusted partner in delivering reliable, scalable technology for years to come.