[randomtree]

I was a hands-on engineering manager brought to lead a similar effort at an ad agency to build out their adtech stack inhouse.

Worked out fine. I've also interviewed a number of people in similar situations. Seems to work out fine when people are interested in what they are doing.

One thing to consider is the cost of it, and the size of the team you would need. I would argue you'd need at least five people regardless of the size of your project to get any semblance of dev culture that would propel the team forward.

As for attracting talent, there's a tremendous amount of talented developers that don't make the cut to get into FAANG for different reasons. Get a technical manager to bootstrap the project, set up interviews, and you should be good.

Also, don't forget about dev tools and ops expenses, a need for oncall, and hiring devops to run it.