We're excited to kick off the Sardine Engineering Blog! This is where our engineering team will share what they're working on, how they tackle tough problems, and what it's like behind the scenes at Sardine.

We'll talk about how our team - spread across different time zones around the world - works together on code reviews, handles urgent issues, and supports each other's growth. Great software comes from great teamwork, so we'll cover both the technical stuff and how we collaborate.

Follow along as we share our journey fighting fraud, simplifying compliance, and creating new credit solutions.

For our first post, let's dive into our recent Hackathon!

2025 Hackathon

Last month, we held our second company-wide hackathon. In just three days, 62 people from 9 countries built 17 amazing projects. Some are already live in production, others are becoming real products, and a few have already sparked exciting conversations with customers.

Our hackathon is 100% remote and open to everyone at Sardine - not just the tech team. Designers, product managers, risk specialists, and operations folks all join in. We do this once a year with a fresh theme each time. This year's focus? AI - whether that meant new product features, internal tools, or ways to work smarter.

The event kicks off with anyone pitching ideas and forming teams. Then we clear everyone's calendars for two full days of building. On day three, every team shows off what they created.

The rules are simple:

• Build something that could help the business (even in the long run)
• Everyone has to demo their work
• Include someone from outside engineering on your team
• It doesn't have to be finished code - prototypes and concepts count too

Projects were judged by our three founders and some impressive outside experts based on innovation, business potential, how well it was built, and presentation quality.

And yes, there were prizes!

This year, the the jury consisted of external judges Angela Strange, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, Ilan Zimmer, Director Payments Fraud risk at Coinbase Wade Arnold, Founder/CEO MOOV  and our 3 co-founders, CEO Soups, CPO Zahid, and COO Adi.

Watching our teams create such impressive projects in just a few days was incredible. Even our guest judges were blown away! As Ilan Zimmer put it: "Thank you again guys for allowing me to be a judge. Sardine continues to impress me with their drive to do better and better. Fraud moves fast...Sardine moves faster!"

We'll be diving deeper into these winning projects in upcoming posts:

• Most Creative: Northern Lights - an AI that helps spot potential fraud by making complex connection networks easier to understand.
• Best Business Solution: Fishy Filter - an AI that catches fake job applicants using our fraud-fighting tech.
• Best Implementation: Analytics Assistant - just talk to it and it'll create custom reports for you.
• Best Presentation: Sauron MCP - an MCP server that automates a bunch of development tasks we used to do manually.
• Audience Favorite: Workflow Genius - build entire workflows just by using voice commands.
• Grand Champion: Shark Water - an AI-powered system that automatically detects and responds to fraud without humans having to do the heavy lifting.
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Since many of these projects are already being considered for our actual product roadmap, you might see them in action soon! We're pumped to share more engineering stories with you going forward. We believe in building in public, and this blog is another step in that direction.

Have thoughts or questions? We'd love to hear from you! Reach out to us at sardine.ai/contact.