Scale Your Team with AI-Ready Tech Talent, On Demand
Your roadmap is not waiting for your hiring cycle, and neither are your competitors. What you need is senior engineers, full-stack developers and specialists who join your team, work your board and take direction from your lead — capacity you can add this month and stop when the work does, without the overhead of permanent headcount.
Tell us what you need builtThe problems this practice solves
None of these are talent problems exactly. They are timing problems — the work is here now and the person to do it is a quarter away — and that is a different thing to solve.
- You have a roadmap, a budget and nobody to build it, and the first hire is still three months of interviews away.
- Every feature on your board is waiting on the same two people, and both of them are also the only ones who can fix production.
- A hiring cycle costs you a quarter before anyone writes a line of code, and you are not certain the headcount is permanent.
- You found the right candidate and lost them to a company that moved faster.
- The work you need done is three months long, which is the worst possible length: too big for your team, too small to hire for.
- The last contractor delivered something nobody on your team can maintain, and you only found out when they left.
What this actually is
What separates these arrangements is not the rate. It is who decides what gets built each week, and who owns what you are left holding at the end.
What each arrangement is
Three arrangements get sold under similar language and they are not the same purchase. Augmentation puts an engineer inside your team: you direct the work, they attend your stand-up, and you are buying capacity. Outsourcing hands the whole thing over: you agree an outcome and a price, somebody else decides how it is built, and you are buying a result. An agency contract usually sits between the two — a team you brief rather than manage, with an account layer in between and a statement of work that defines what you can ask for.
Who manages the work
The distinction that matters is who manages the work, because that is the cost nobody quotes. Under augmentation, that is you. Your lead assigns the tickets, sets the standard for done and notices on a Tuesday that something is drifting. It only works if you have somebody to do that. If you do not, augmentation is the wrong purchase and it will look like an engineering failure when it is really a management gap — which is worth knowing before you buy rather than three months in.
Who owns the code
And then who owns the code, which should be the shortest conversation and is often the most expensive one. Under a sane arrangement the answer is you, from the first commit, in your own repository under your own licence, with nothing held back on the supplier's side. Check it in writing whoever you use. The alternative only becomes visible at the end, when you want to move the work and discover something essential to it belongs to somebody else.
The useful question is not how quickly somebody can start. It is who on your side will be deciding what they do each week — because if the answer is nobody, more hands will make it worse.
Who you can put on your roadmap
Six roles, with what each one is fluent in. Most engagements are one or two of these rather than a team.
Senior React.js Frontend Developer
You get a frontend engineer who has shipped production interfaces rather than practised on them — at home in React Router, Redux and GraphQL, and able to pick up your component conventions instead of importing their own.
- Next.js
- Gatsby
- Redux
- Axios
- Formik
- React Router
- Material-UI
- ANT Design
- React Query
- Styled-components
Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O Developer
You get someone who has already worked inside a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environment, D365 for short — X++, the Power Platform, and the D365 integrations that break when Microsoft ships an update — rather than a generalist reading the documentation for the first time on your project.
- X++ Language
- Retail Module
- Supply Chain
- Integration & Extensions
- Reporting & Analytics
- Upgrade & Migration
Senior .NET / C# Backend Developer
You get a backend engineer fluent in ASP.NET Core, C# and the .NET ecosystem, used to working in a codebase somebody else designed and to leaving it more maintainable than they found it.
- ASP.NET Core
- C#
- SignalR
- Dapper
- Azure SDK
- AutoMapper
- Hangfire
- Json.NET
Flutter Mobile App Developer
You get a cross-platform mobile engineer working in Dart and Flutter, including the UI/UX detail and the offline behaviour that decide whether an app survives its first week on a real device.
- Dart
- Firebase
- GetX
- RxDart
- Riverpod
- Hive
- Flutter Hooks
- Dio
Odoo ERP Developer & Consultant
You get an engineer who has done Odoo customisation in Python against a live business rather than a demo database, and who will tell you when a configuration change would do the job that you were about to pay for as code.
- Odoo Framework
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- QWeb
- OWL Components
- XML-RPC
- External APIs
AI / ML Engineer
You get an engineer who has taken machine learning models into production, not only into a notebook — large language model, or LLM, applications, recommendation systems and intelligent automation built against your own data and measured on it.
- Python
- TensorFlow
- PyTorch
- LangChain
- OpenAI API
- Scikit-learn
- Hugging Face
- MLOps
- RAG
- Vector DBs
How open-ended work is run
An engagement here has no delivery date, because there is nothing being delivered — you are adding capacity to a roadmap that is already yours. What you get instead is a clear way in and a clear way out.
- Before anyone is proposed
What the gap actually is
You describe the work rather than the job title, because those are different things and the second one is often wrong. What comes back is an honest read on whether you need one engineer, a pair, or nobody yet.
- Choosing who
Meet the engineer, not a CV
You interview the person who would actually be doing the work, and you can turn them down. Nobody is vetted on your behalf and presented as a fait accompli, because the only assessment that matters is whether your team wants to work with them.
- Agreeing the terms
Written down, including the exit
Notice, rate, working hours, how a problem gets escalated and who to escalate it to — agreed in writing before anyone starts. The length of the commitment is part of that conversation rather than a surprise in a renewal.
- The first weeks
Onboarded into your process, not ours
Your augmented engineer joins your stand-up, your board and your repository, and works to your definition of done. Nobody can integrate with a team and ramp up on a codebase at the same time without it showing, so ramp-up is planned for rather than pretended away, and the early sprints are scoped knowing somebody is still learning your code.
- For as long as it runs
An account manager who stays after kickoff
One person outside the engineering relationship stays responsible for it, so a problem with the arrangement has somewhere to go that is not the developer you work with daily. Reviews look at whether the capacity is still the right shape, including when the answer is that you no longer need it.
No date is published for work of this shape, and none is implied. If what you need is a scope and a date you can hold someone to, the packages below carry both.
Some of this work has a written scope already
Three arrangements in this practice have been run enough times to state upfront what they contain, how they are billed and what they cost.
What buyers ask about added capacity
Who manages the work — you or us?
You do. Your engineer takes direction from your lead, works your tickets and attends your ceremonies, and that is the whole point of the arrangement: it adds capacity without adding a management layer. What sits on this side is the employment relationship and an account manager for the arrangement itself, not the work.
Who owns the code?
You do, from the first commit — it lands in your repository under your licence, and nothing is retained on this side. That is worth checking in any contract of this kind, because it is the one term that is genuinely painful to discover you got wrong after the engagement ends.
How is this different from outsourcing a project?
Outsourcing hands over an outcome: you agree a scope and a price, and somebody else decides how it gets built. Augmentation hands over nothing — you keep the decisions, the backlog and the architecture, and buy hands to execute them. If you would rather not run the work at all, a fixed-scope project is the honest answer and three of them are listed below.
Can we see what these developers have actually shipped?
Yes, before you commit rather than after. The engineers here have put production systems into finance, logistics, healthcare and retail, and you can review the relevant work and interview the person directly. Expect that of any supplier — a rate quoted against a CV you cannot check is not much of an offer.
What happens if it is not working out?
You say so and it stops, on the notice agreed at the start. A replacement is one option, and no replacement is the other; nobody stays on your account because a contract makes it awkward to leave. That is easier to promise up front than to honour later, which is why the notice period is written down rather than discussed.
Is this cheaper than hiring?
Usually on the total, and always on the timing. There is no recruitment fee, no notice period at the far end and no overhead of a permanent seat, and the cost stops when the work does. Where it is not cheaper is a role you will genuinely need for years — at that point hiring is the better deal and you should be told so.
If none of that is quite your situation
Plenty of what lands in this practice does not fit a role card: a specialism nobody on your team has and nobody needs full time, a handover from a supplier who is leaving, someone to hold a live system while you recruit properly, or a second pair of eyes on a codebase before you commit to it.
Describe what you are dealing with in a free consultancy session and you will get a straight read on how it would be approached, what it depends on, and where the risk sits. If the answer is that you should hire rather than do this, that is what you will hear.