Team Extension
Outsourced engineering rarely fails on skill. It fails on context — the accumulated knowledge of why a system is shaped the way it is, which lives in your team's heads and does not travel in a statement of work.
The problem is context, not capability
Most disappointing engagements were staffed by capable people. What went wrong earlier: the vendor was given tickets rather than problems, could not see the constraint that made the obvious solution wrong, and produced work that was technically complete and practically unusable. Nobody was incompetent. The information was never transferred.
So the first weeks matter more than the rate card. We spend them reading your code, sitting in your incidents, and asking why decisions were made — and we would rather bill you for that than skip it and guess. If a vendor is productive on day three, they are working on something that did not need understanding.
How teams use us
Embedded engineers
Individuals joining your existing team, your stand-ups and your review process. Managed by your leads, not by ours.
A complete squad
A self-contained team owning a service or workstream end to end, with its own tech lead accountable for delivery.
Specialist for a specific problem
Short, bounded work where you need someone who has done this particular thing before — a migration, a performance problem, a compliance deadline.
Overflow during a push
Extra capacity for a fixed period, on work parallel enough that adding people genuinely helps rather than slowing the team down.
Taking over an inherited system
Adopting software whose original team has gone. Starts with reconstructing how it works, which is the part most handovers skip.
Covering a gap
Holding a service while you recruit, with the explicit goal of handing it to your permanent hire rather than becoming the permanent answer.
How an engagement runs
Read before writing
The first week is spent in your codebase and your incident history, not in planning meetings. We come back with what we think is fragile, and you tell us which parts we have wrong.
Ship one small change
A real change through your full process — review, deploy, verify. It surfaces every undocumented step in the pipeline while the stakes are still low.
Take a slice of ownership
One service, one workflow, one area. Named people, on-call if that is part of the role, accountable in your standups rather than reporting in parallel.
Write down what we learn
Decision records and runbooks go in your repository as we go. The knowledge we accumulate has to be recoverable when we are gone, or we have made you more dependent, not less.
Agree the exit before you need it
Notice period, handover scope and a named receiver, settled at the start. An exit clause negotiated during a dispute is worth nothing.
What you are left with
Named engineers
The same people throughout, not a pool. Continuity is most of the value of this arrangement.
Your accounts
Your repositories, your infrastructure, your credentials. Nothing important lives with us.
Written context
Runbooks and decision records committed to your repository as the work happens.
An exit
Agreed notice and handover, defined on day one, exercisable without a negotiation.
How we keep the work yours
An outsourcing relationship that becomes hard to leave was designed badly, whether or not that was deliberate. The mechanics of avoiding it are unglamorous and mostly about where knowledge is allowed to accumulate.
We work in your repositories, your cloud accounts and your ticketing system. Decisions get written down where your team can find them. Your engineers review our pull requests — which is slower than reviewing each other's, and is the point.
- Your repositories, your infrastructure, your accounts — nothing important only we can reach
- Architecture decisions recorded in your repo, not in our project notes
- Your engineers on our pull requests, from the first week
- Named people, not a rotating pool — continuity is most of the value
- Notice period and handover scope agreed at the start, not negotiated at the end
When not to hire us
If you need twenty engineers next month, we cannot help. We are a small senior team with no bench, which is exactly why context transfers quickly — and also why we cannot scale into a body shop for you.
We also do not take work where our engineers would be barred from talking to the people who use the software. Second-hand requirements are how teams build the wrong thing very efficiently.
Common questions
We overlap with your working hours for the things that need synchrony — design reviews, incidents, cut-over nights — then asynchronously for everything else. Operating from the US, UK, UAE, Canada and Australia covers most business hours. If your team is elsewhere, we say honestly how much overlap you would actually get rather than promising follow-the-sun coverage.
Related work
Bring us the part that is stuck.
Send the constraint you are working around and we will come back with an approach, a rough shape of the work, and what it would take to hand it over.