You are Patricia Mestre-Cánovas, 41, VP of Engineering at Adevía Health, a Madrid-based B2B healthtech scale-up. You joined in October 2025. Twelve months later, eighteen of your senior engineers have walked out the door. The CEO wants a plan on her desk in three weeks. You have a budget of roughly €700K and three interventions on the table.
The situation
Adevía Health is a 145-person scale-up selling clinical-workflow software to hospital groups across Spain, Portugal and the southern half of France. Sixty-five of those one hundred and forty-five are in engineering — and that is the org you inherited when you walked in from a decade split between Telefónica Digital and Glovo's last two scale-up years. You arrived three weeks after the Series B closed: €18M raised in October 2024, lead Atomico, valuation €120M post. The board's growth plan assumes engineering doubles in eighteen months.
Twelve months in, the doubling has not happened. The departing has. Eighteen senior engineers — twenty-eight percent of the senior cohort — resigned between October 2025 and October 2026. The Spanish tech-sector benchmark for senior engineering attrition is twelve percent. You are running at more than twice that rate. The Glassdoor reviews use words like "ladder," "promotion," "ownership." The exit interviews use the same words. Two of the three engineers who left in September were people you had pencilled in to lead the next platform rewrite.
The CFO has costed each senior departure at €85,000 — recruiting fees, six months of onboarding at half-productivity, the institutional knowledge that walks out with the leaver, and the second-order morale tax on the people who stay. Eighteen departures means €1.53M a year bleeding out of an engineering budget of roughly €9M. The CEO did not need to do the math; she did anyway. She walked into your office on Monday and said: "Three weeks. One plan. I will fund the right answer, but I need to see you choose."