Lead Sherpa Unleashed Developer Innovation

Lead Sherpa offers TCPA-compliant SMS, advanced skip tracing, and automated data stacking, enabling high-volume real estate investors to efficiently find and engage motivated sellers, and close more deals. When its lean engineering team decided to modernize their application by containerizing workloads, it leveraged Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) for simple deployment, easy management, and greater developer control. Doing so provided the engine it needed to further drive growth, innovation, and a competitive edge.

In an industry where speed and precision are everything, Lead Sherpa has built its reputation on delivering high-quality data to users. It is particularly known for its ability to connect real estate investors with off-market investment opportunities via timely SMS messages — one of the most effective lead generation tools available.

When new SMS regulations emerged in 2023, Lead Sherpa needed to double down on providing investors with the highest quality data, and doing so as efficiently as possible. It recognized the opportunity to reduce costs and increase infrastructure reliability by migrating to Kubernetes and containerizing workloads. But with a lean engineering team, it needed a powerful yet streamlined way to get there.

Having initially scaled its infrastructure on Linode (now Akamai Cloud), Lead Sherpa knew where to turn. LKE offered the perfect combination of cost-efficiency, reliability, and simplicity — exactly what the team needed for this critical migration.

“LKE was a natural choice. Our legacy virtual machines were already deployed on Akamai, and LKE offered the best value compared to other cloud providers,” explained Ben Petersen, VP of Engineering at Lead Sherpa. “Plus, the Akamai support team has always been incredible,” added Philippe Ouellet, Software Engineer at Lead Sherpa.

With just two engineers, Lead Sherpa successfully migrated its infrastructure in two months — an impressive feat given the complexity of Kubernetes. The team tackled the migration in phases, first deploying a utilities cluster in a single day, then a production cluster, and finally, a staging environment and sandbox for developers.

Thanks to LKE’s open approach, the entire process — which included integrating Lead Sherpa’s existing tools like GitLab runners — went smoothly. Akamai developer forums also played a key role, providing insights from other engineers that helped fine-tune configurations.

“LKE made Kubernetes and containerization easy. We’re a small team, but we move fast, and LKE allowed us to operate at our pace,” said Ouellet.

Lead Sherpa’s infrastructure needs to handle massive datasets — thousands of files, each containing tens of thousands of rows of critical data. Before Kubernetes, the system maxed out at 50,000-row files due to scalability issues. Moreover, it took 15 hours to process them. Now, with autoscaling enabled by LKE, Lead Sherpa processes 200,000-row files in a single day — without overpaying for resources.

“Before, we were burning money keeping servers at max capacity, just in case. With Kubernetes and LKE autoscaling, we only pay for what we need, when we need it. In fact, we have saved nearly 60% on infrastructure,” said Petersen.

LKE has also furthered Lead Sherpa’s development culture of continuous iteration and experimentation. “Our previous infrastructure was so static and brittle that we were afraid to make changes,” explained Petersen.

Combined, the declarative nature of Kubernetes and ease of managing workloads using LKE freed the company’s developers to do their best work. Now they create real-time staging environments to test new features in production-like conditions before pushing changes live. “It’s a safe way for our developers to visualize changes and try new things with little risk,” Petersen continued.

According to Petersen, LKE gave his team the freedom to experiment without worrying about downtime. “Now, we can push harder with our ‘move fast, break things’ mentality because breaking things doesn’t break the business. Instead, we can confidently pursue efficiency and innovation.”

Lead Sherpa is an all-in-one lead generation and marketing platform purpose-built for real estate professionals. Its core offerings include a fully TCPA-compliant SMS marketing system, skip tracing, and the PropStack^® list stacking solution — empowering users to quickly discover motivated sellers, prioritize leads by multiple distress indicators, and reach them at scale while staying compliant. By combining robust data enrichment, local-number texting, and streamlined workflows, Lead Sherpa helps investors close more deals and grow their real estate businesses safely and efficiently.