Sesame HR

In 2015, Albert Soriano founded Sesame HR in Valencia with a straightforward idea: HR professionals spend too much time on administrative tasks when they should be spending it on people. The all-in-one SaaS platform was designed to follow covers time tracking, absence management, payroll, recruitment, onboarding, performance evaluation, learning, people analytics, and AI-powered HR intelligence.

Sesame HR is 100% SaaS, multi-tenant, fully managed by the company. All customers share the same front-end and database infrastructure.

Silvia Valero joined the Sesame group more than 10 years ago. About six of those years she has worked on product and infrastructure, and now as Chief of Product Expansion. She was able to translate market needs into a clear direction for the development, design, and DevOps teams, while including an international expansion.

Around seven to eight years ago, the infrastructure of Sesame HR consisted of four Bare Metal servers with a proxy machine for horizontal load balancing. The architecture was monolithic: just PHP and MySQL. Spanish employees would clock in at 8am, 2pm, or 3pm. Same time zone, same peak times. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneous events would hit the system at once. A single clock-in triggered a chain of calculations: vacation balance updates, overtime pool recalculations, payroll accruals. The processes queued up. And the resounding message was always the same: ponerle más hierro, or add more hardware.

Then the 2019 time-tracking law arrived. Spain now required all companies to record employee working hours. Large enterprises that had never needed Sesame HR suddenly sought out its services. The platform was processing 40 GB of events per day with approximately one-eighth of its current customer base alone. The maths no longer added up.

Workers were clocking in from mining sites with zero connectivity. Tablets handling hundreds of employees were pushed to their memory limits. Enterprise clients demanded data dislocation across multiple sites. The monolith couldn't take it any more. By 2019, the time-tracking law forced the decision: Sesame HR that had started completely from zero now needed all the infrastructure, and all the development. It was a risk to integrate, but according to Silvia, it was certainly also the right call.

The rebuild began in 2019.

Training started in 2020 with Docker, followed by Kubernetes in 2021, as the team re-skilled for this new architecture. Sysadmins who had spent years managing physical servers had to learn containerisation and orchestration from scratch, becoming DevOps engineers in the process. It was complicated for teams to adapt: the development team had to change its entire concept of how the product was built, and the infrastructure team had to build new expertise alongside it.

The monolithic architecture they had started with was replaced with microservices. Front-end and back-end were separated, containerised, and deployed without downtime. Multiple database types were introduced for different workloads:

• Percona DB in multi-cluster configuration, with read and write traffic separated across clusters
• Elasticsearch for event data persistence

The Public Cloud setup also was set up to absorb sudden spikes that would have overwhelmed the previous monolith.

“OVHcloud Public Cloud gives us the flexibility to react fast. If a client suddenly adds 5,000 employees, we scale instantly. That speed would have been impossible with physical hardware.”
Silvia Valero, Chief of Product Expansion, Sesame HR

Security sits at the core of this partnership. Sesame HR operates as a member of the OVHcloud Open Trusted Cloud ISV programme and won ISV of the Year at the Backstage Awards 2025. Silvia works directly with enterprise clients to align their security requirements with its infrastructure. Some of these clients entered with strict cloud policies or confusing data residency rules from the past. They have been consistently willing to modify their own rules to accept Sesame HR's managed model because the data protection guarantees make the transition worthwhile.

“Working with OVHcloud ensures our infrastructure meets strict security requirements. Our customers know their data is protected in the European cloud, and we guarantee them availability.”
Silvia Valero, Chief of Product Expansion, Sesame HR

The company grew from 50 to 300 employees in three years, requiring a 40-person office space and securing over 700 clients in Mexico alone.

The growth was only possible because its infrastructure stopped being a constraint. The monolithic setup on bare metal servers gave way to microservices. The team spends their time on the product now, instead of the infrastructure.

The previous system processed 40 GB of events per day with one-eighth of current customers. Expansion is no longer a hardware problem. The company enters new regions by adapting product and compliance, rather than procuring physical servers.

The most tangible result from its infrastructure shift the growing space Sesame HR created. The team is already building AI into the product for recruitment matching and churn analytics, while using internal AI tools to assist with code and design.

Sesame HR now operates in more than 30 countries. Latin America is still its current priority, with an established presence in Mexico and a new office opening in Brazil. In Europe, Portugal is its strongest focus, with plans to serve Italy also in the pipeline.