Follow-the-Sun Support: How inDrive Cut Incident SLA from 72 Hours to 2 Hours

Real SLA numbers, the legal quirks of hiring in Brazil, and a follow-the-sun rotation that actually works for 24/7 incident support. TL;DR Problem: A 3-person incident support team on a 5/2 schedule in Kazakhstan had a 72-hour SLA — anything filed after hours or on weekends waited until Monday. Solution: A three-country follow-the-sun rotation (Kazakhstan → Brazil → Malaysia), built without any night shifts. Result: SLA dropped to 2 hours for normal-priority tickets and 1 hour for critical incidents, with full 24/7 coverage. Bonus: What Brazilian labor law (CLT) requires you to know before you build a shift schedule there. The Problem: A 72-Hour SLA and No Night Coverage Friday, 18:00. The workday ends, the team heads home — and that’s exactly when the app breaks. Users hit a “Failed to load” error when accepting an order. First-line support runs 24/7 and keeps receiving tickets, but the technical escalation team works a standard 5/2 schedule. The result: unresolved tickets pile up until Monday morning. At the time our second-line technical support team was formed, there was no formal SLA. In practice, ticket processing time had crept up to 72 working hours — and we couldn’t even say how many tickets were coming in, because there was no ticketing system to track volume. Starting point: 3 engineers based in Kazakhstan (Almaty, UTC+5) Schedule: 5/2, 9:00–18:00 Coverage split by vertical: Intercity/couriers/freight, US/Australia, and Ride-Hailing No dashboards, no volume tracking — a fully reactive setup Anything filed evenings or weekends sat until Monday Why We Ruled Out Night Shifts As inDrive expanded into the US, Australia, and the broader LATAM region, ticket volume grew — and so did the temptation to just add night shifts in Kazakhstan. We deliberately avoided that path, for three reasons: Burnout. Night shifts wreck sleep and long-term productivity. Daytime work keeps the team healthier and more sustainable. Incident quality. A daytime brain reads logs and admin panels far more accurately than a sleep-deprived one — especially on complex incidents. Cross-team collaboration. Working daytime hours means overlapping with HQ teams, which builds context and communication skills that a graveyard shift never gets. Instead, we built a follow-the-sun support model: hire in time zones that naturally cover the gaps, so every engineer works their own local daytime. Iteration 1: Kazakhstan, 2/2 Shifts Goal: Extend coverage beyond the standard 5/2 day without burning out the existing team. What we did: Hired 2 additional specialists in Kazakhstan on a 2/2 rotation Shift window: 03:00–15:00 UTC (08:00–20:00 Almaty time, UTC+5) Routed the full first-line escalation stream to this team Why Kazakhstan again: Most of the ticket volume in this hemisphere falls inside Kazakhstan working hours, and we already had strong first-line support talent there to promote internally. Result: SLA dropped from 72 hours to roughly 16 hours. Evenings in Almaty were now covered — but early morning and overnight for Asia, plus mornings for other regions, were still blind spots. Iteration 2: Brazil, 1/1 Shifts Goal: Cover the overnight gap in Almaty and cut response times for LATAM and adjacent regions. What we did: Hired specialists based in Brazil Shift window: 11:00–23:00 UTC (08:00–20:00 Recife time, UTC−3) Result: Night and early-morning coverage improved significantly. One gap remained: a roughly 4-hour seam between the end of the Brazil shift and the start of the Kazakhstan shift (04:00–08:00 Almaty time). Iteration 3: Malaysia — Closing the Loop Goal: Close the remaining early-morning gap and strengthen coverage for the Asian region. What we did: Hired specialists in Malaysia Shift window: 00:00–12:00 UTC (08:00–20:00 Kuala Lumpur time, UTC+8) Result: Full, continuous 24/7 coverage across three countries — with zero night shifts anywhere in the rotation. Final Numbers P.S. — What to Know Before You Hire in Brazil for Shift Work Brazilian labor law (CLT — Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho) has two provisions that directly affect shift scheduling and staffing math: The 12×36 schedule is the legal norm. Under Article 59-A of the CLT (upheld by the Brazilian Supreme Court, STF), employees can legally work 12 consecutive hours followed by 36 hours of rest. In practice: no single person can staff every day — you need paired slots by design. Mandatory Sunday rest. Under Law №605/49, employees must get a rest day that falls on a Sunday at a defined frequency — once every 7 weeks for men, once every 15 days for women (per Article 386 of the CLT). This typically forces a full Saturday+Sunday weekend roughly once every two months, which has to be built into the rotation in advance. Takeaway for planning: budget a staffing buffer from day one. If you hire “just enough” people to cover the hours on paper, the first mandatory rest period will blow a hole in your schedule. If you’re building or scaling an incident support rotation, the short version is: don’t add night shifts — add time zones. What gaps has your team hit trying to cover 24/7?