Hire a Dedicated Development Team in India
You run the standups, set the priorities and review the pull requests. We recruit the engineers, employ them, pay them and give them a desk in Mumbai. That is the whole arrangement when you hire a dedicated development team in India through Pillai Infotech.
Every engagement starts with a 14-day risk-free trial — you pay only if you are satisfied.
What you actually get
Most offshore vendors sell you an outcome and keep the engineers behind a project manager. This is the other arrangement. The engineers sit inside your process, and the vendor stays out of the way.
What Pillai does
We source and screen candidates against your brief. We employ the ones you pick, on Indian contracts, at salaries benchmarked to the senior end of the Indian market. We run payroll, provident fund, statutory compliance, laptops, office space, network and backup power. We replace people who leave. We invoice you monthly, in your currency, from one company.
What you do
You interview and reject candidates. You own the backlog, the sprint, the definition of done and the release calendar. You run standups and one-to-ones. You review code and set the architectural direction. Your engineering manager is their engineering manager. If you want a lead inside the team, you interview for that too.
This is not delivery under our accountability. We do not take ownership of your roadmap, quote a fixed scope, or put a delivery manager between you and the people writing your code. If that is what you want, it is a legitimate thing to want, and it is a different conversation. Have it with us before you sign either way.
A senior team at your junior budget
The monthly cost of an engineer in India with eight to ten years of shipping experience lands near what a graduate or one-to-two-year engineer costs in your market — in San Francisco, in London, in Sydney. Same line on your budget. A different decade of experience sitting behind it.
The second half of that sentence matters as much as the first, and most vendors leave it out. These engineers are paid well by the market they actually live and spend in. Indian senior salaries in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune have moved hard over the last decade, and we pay at the senior end of that market because that is who we want to keep. The gap you benefit from is a gap between two labour markets and two costs of living. It is not a gap between what the work is worth and what the person is paid.
Get that framing wrong and you get the team you deserve. A buyer who treats India as a discount bin gets the engineers a discount bin attracts, then concludes offshore does not work. The arbitrage is real, and it only pays if you spend it on seniority instead of pocketing it.
Three seniors beat six juniors
Given a fixed monthly budget, the obvious move is to buy the largest number of people it covers. It is usually the wrong move.
Communication paths grow roughly as the square of headcount. Six people means fifteen pairs to keep aligned; three means three. Across a ten-hour time gap, each of those pairs communicates by written handover. The review load stacks on top of that, and it lands on you: junior output needs senior review, and the only seniors on hand to do it are yours. A six-junior team quietly converts your staff engineer into a full-time reviewer. You paid for six people and took one of your own off the roadmap to service them.
The expensive part arrives in month nine. Juniors write code that works. Seniors write code that is still cheap to change after three product pivots. The difference is invisible in the first demo and dominant by the second year.
Where juniors do make sense is underneath a senior who owns the mentoring. A team of one lead, two seniors and one junior is a shape we build often. A team of six juniors and a hope is not.
How does a dedicated team in India work with my timezone?
Differently depending on where you sit, and anyone selling you the same pitch in Seattle and in Sydney is selling marketing. The offsets decide the working model, so start from the offsets.
| Your location | Offset from India (IST) | What the team is in practice |
|---|---|---|
| US West (PST) | India 13.5h ahead | Overnight turnaround. Near-zero live overlap, so written handovers carry everything |
| US East (EST) | India 10.5h ahead | Handover model with one to two hours of forced overlap in India's evening |
| Canada (Toronto / Vancouver) | India 10.5h / 13.5h ahead | Split by coast. Toronto behaves like US East, Vancouver like US West |
| United Kingdom | India 4.5–5.5h ahead | A shared afternoon. India's afternoon is your morning, so standups are real |
| Australia | India 4.5–5.5h behind | A team you can talk to. India's morning is your midday |
| New Zealand | India 6.5–7.5h behind | India's morning is your afternoon. Real-time collaboration works here |
For a San Francisco company the pitch is that work happens while you sleep, and the price of admission is discipline: tickets specified well enough to be worked without a follow-up question, and a written handover at the end of every India day. For a Melbourne company the pitch is the opposite and much easier, because you can hold a live design discussion at 2pm your time. We publish the actual working hours and the guaranteed overlap window in the contract. The full region-by-region breakdown, including standup times and what handover discipline costs you, is in our guide to dedicated development teams in India for US, UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand companies.
Roles you can hire
The roles below are the ones we staff repeatedly and can screen properly. We are not going to print a wall of forty logos and imply we have a bench for every one of them.
- Backend engineers — Python, Node, Java, .NET, Go, PHP. Service design, data modelling, queues, the parts that get expensive when they are wrong.
- Frontend engineers — React, Angular, Vue, TypeScript. People who have shipped a design system and maintained it, not only consumed one.
- Mobile engineers — Flutter, React Native, native iOS and Android.
- QA engineers — manual and automation. Playwright, Cypress, Appium, API contract testing. Hiring one early is the cheapest quality decision on this list.
- DevOps and platform engineers — AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, CI pipelines, on-call and observability.
- Data and AI engineers — pipelines, warehousing, and applied LLM work where the job is evaluation and retrieval rather than a demo.
- Business analysts — for teams that need requirements turned into tickets an offshore engineer can act on without a phone call.
- UX and product designers — research, flows, design systems, handover files engineers can build from.
- Tech leads — the role that decides whether the rest of the team works.
If you want a single specialist rather than a team, look at the individual hire developers pages instead.
How we build your team
1. The brief
A call, then a written brief. Roles, stack, seniority, the overlap window you need, how you review code, what your first ninety days look like. We tell you on this call if we think the team shape is wrong, and we give you the start date we actually believe. A four-person team takes longer to assemble than a single hire, and anyone promising the same timeline for both is guessing.
2. You interview
We screen first: résumé, a technical conversation, and a work sample relevant to your stack. Then you interview every candidate yourself and reject the ones you do not want. Run your own loop, your own take-home, your own pairing session. Nobody joins your team without your yes. Profiles for common stacks usually start reaching you within 48 hours; scarce skills take longer and we say so upfront.
3. Onboarding
We handle contracts, background checks, equipment and desks. You handle access, codebase walkthroughs and the first tickets. Week one is deliberately small: environment running, one trivial change merged, one production deploy watched.
4. Steady state
The team is in your standup, your board and your on-call rota. We stay in the background on employment, retention and replacement. You get one invoice a month and one person here to escalate to when something about the arrangement, rather than the code, needs fixing.
What does a dedicated development team in India cost?
Priced on team shape, not a rate card
We do not publish a rate card. A per-role hourly grid is the fastest way to get compared on the wrong axis: two engineers at the same advertised rate can differ by six years of experience. What actually moves your monthly number is seniority mix, how scarce the skills are, team size, and how long the engagement runs.
Bring the roles and the seniority you have in mind and you get a figure on the first call. If the number does not work, we will tell you what team shape would.
Dedicated team vs staff augmentation vs offshore development center
Three models get sold under overlapping names. They fail in different ways, so pick on the failure mode you can least afford.
| Staff augmentation | Dedicated team | Offshore development center | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit you buy | A person | A team, typically 3–10 | A facility and an org chart |
| Who directs the work | You | You | You, through a local leadership layer |
| Sensible horizon | Weeks to a few months | Quarters to years | Years |
| Ramp cost | Low. Person in, person out | Moderate. Weeks of domain learning | High. Entity, office, HR, compliance |
| Exit | Short notice | Contractual notice, no entity to unwind | Slow and legally involved |
| How it fails | Nobody retains context between engagements | You underfeed it work and pay for idle capacity | Overhead outruns the headcount it supports |
| Where to go | Contract hire | This page | Talk to a firm that sets up entities |
A dedicated development team in India sits in the middle deliberately. You get people who stay long enough to learn your domain, without registering an Indian subsidiary, leasing an office or acquiring a payroll compliance problem in a jurisdiction you do not operate in.
How you actually pay an Indian development team
This is the part nobody publishes, and it is the part that stalls first-time offshore deals in procurement. None of it is legal or tax advice, and your accountant should read this section before your first invoice. But you should walk into that conversation knowing what the paperwork looks like.
United States
You collect a Form W-8BEN-E from us before the first payment. It certifies that Pillai Infotech is a foreign entity and, where relevant, claims benefits under the US–India income tax treaty. Because the engineers perform the work in India, the income is foreign-source, so in the ordinary case there is nothing for you to withhold. Foreign entities do not receive a 1099; the W-8BEN-E is what your AP team files instead. Payment goes by USD wire to our Indian bank, or through Wise or a similar rail for smaller amounts. Wires cost more in fees and less in FX spread, so the crossover point depends on your invoice size.
United Kingdom
There is no PAYE and no National Insurance, because you are paying a company for a service, not paying a person for their labour. For VAT, the general B2B place-of-supply rule puts the supply where you are, so most UK clients account for it under the reverse charge: you self-account for the VAT on your return and recover it in the same return if you are fully taxable. Cashflow effect is usually nil. Payment is a GBP or USD international transfer. Ask your accountant to confirm the reverse-charge treatment against your own VAT position rather than assuming ours.
Australia and New Zealand
Same principle. You are buying an imported service from a non-resident supplier, so there is no PAYG withholding on employee wages, no superannuation and no payroll tax attached to the engineers. GST on imported services is the item to check: whether you have a reverse-charge obligation depends on how much of your own activity is input-taxed. Australia's treatment of payments to Indian technology firms has moved in recent years following the India–Australia trade agreement, which is worth raising explicitly with your tax adviser rather than relying on older guidance.
On our side of the wire
Export of services from India is a zero-rated supply under the IGST Act when payment arrives in convertible foreign exchange. In practice that means our invoice to you carries no Indian GST. Our bank issues a Foreign Inward Remittance Certificate for each payment, which is the document that evidences the export. You do not need to do anything with it. It exists so that our compliance is provable, which is worth knowing if your procurement team asks how the Indian side is regulated.
A vendor invoice is not payroll. The engineers are employees of an Indian company, on an Indian contract, under Indian employment law. You are not their employer, in any jurisdiction. That is what keeps this arrangement clear of the worker-misclassification exposure that catches companies who hire overseas individuals directly as contractors and then direct their work like staff. It is also why UK clients do not need to run an IR35 status determination on a service company's employed engineers, though your legal team should confirm that against your own contract wording.
Who owns the code, and how your data is protected
The IP chain has to hold in two places
American work-for-hire doctrine does not reach across borders on its own, so ownership is established by express assignment rather than assumed. Each engineer's Indian employment agreement assigns work product to Pillai Infotech. Our master services agreement then assigns it to you on creation. Check that phrase in any offshore contract you sign, ours included: an assignment that vests only on payment of the final invoice means a billing dispute becomes an ownership dispute.
Data protection, by the law that applies to you
India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 governs personal data handled on the Indian side. If you are in the UK or EU and the team will touch personal data, you need an Article 28 data processing agreement plus a lawful transfer mechanism, because India has no adequacy decision. In practice that is the Standard Contractual Clauses, with the UK Addendum or the IDTA for UK controllers. We sign these as a matter of course. Ask for them before onboarding.
Access control
Repositories, cloud accounts and CI live under your organisation, with named accounts per engineer, SSO where you have it, and the narrowest permission set that still lets someone ship. Production data should not sit in a development environment in Mumbai or anywhere else. When a project genuinely needs it, we work from masked or synthetic datasets. Background verification runs before onboarding, and access is revoked the day someone rolls off.
When you should not hire a dedicated team
Four situations where this model is the wrong purchase. We would rather lose the deal on this page than three months into a contract.
You need two developers for six weeks. Use staff augmentation. A dedicated team pays back through people who accumulate context, and six weeks is not long enough to accumulate any. Our contract hire model is built for exactly this: individual engineers, month to month, no lock-in.
Nobody on your side has time to manage them. This model puts the management on you. If your only engineering lead is already at capacity, a remote team ten hours away adds to that pressure. Either free somebody up, hire a lead into the team and give them real authority, or buy delivery accountability from a vendor who sells it. All three are reasonable. Pretending you have management bandwidth you do not have is not.
Your requirements change faster than you can write them down. Offshore work at a ten-hour gap runs on written specification. If your product direction is genuinely still being discovered week by week, keep that discovery close and offshore the parts that have settled.
Regulation or contract forbids it. Some defence, healthcare and public sector contracts require citizenship, residency or in-country data processing. Check your customer contracts before your vendor contracts.
Common questions
Do the engineers work for us or for Pillai Infotech?
Both, in different senses. Legally they are our employees in India, on our payroll, with our benefits and our office. Operationally they work for you: they attend your standups, take tickets from your board, follow your branching rules and report to your engineering manager. We handle recruitment, employment, payroll, statutory compliance and workspace. You handle priorities, code review and performance direction. There is no Pillai project manager sitting between you and the engineers unless you ask for one.
How much overlap do we get with our working hours?
It depends on where you are, and we publish the real numbers rather than claiming a 24/7 cycle. India is 4.5 to 5.5 hours ahead of the UK, so a UK team gets most of a shared afternoon. Australia is 4.5 to 5.5 hours ahead of India and New Zealand 6.5 to 7.5 hours ahead, so India's morning is your midday or afternoon and live standups genuinely work. US East is 10.5 hours behind India and US West 13.5 hours behind, which means one or two hours of forced overlap in India's evening at best. We agree the overlap window in writing before the team starts.
What happens if someone on the team is not working out?
Tell us in week three, not month six. We start a replacement search, you interview candidates exactly as you did for the original hire, and the engineer who is not a fit moves off your project. Ask for the specific commercial terms during the brief so they go into the contract rather than sitting as a promise on a web page. We would rather write down what we will actually do than publish a service level we cannot evidence.
Do we have to pay Indian taxes or withhold anything?
In the normal case, no. You pay a commercial invoice from an Indian company for services performed in India. That is a vendor payment, not payroll. A US client collects a Form W-8BEN-E from us to document our foreign status; because the work is performed outside the United States the income is foreign-source, so there is generally nothing to withhold and no 1099 for a foreign entity. UK clients usually account for the supply under the reverse charge. Australian and Canadian treatments differ again. Give the section on payment mechanics to your accountant before the first invoice.
Who owns the code the team writes?
You do, from the moment it is written. Worth checking in any offshore contract, ours included: that the assignment vests on creation and not on payment of a final invoice, so a billing dispute cannot become an ownership dispute. Check too that it covers designs, documentation, test suites and infrastructure code, not only application source. And ask for a list of the third-party and open-source components the team brings in, with their licences, so you know what you own outright and what you hold on someone else's terms. Repositories, cloud accounts and CI live under your organisation from day one.
What is the minimum team size and how long do we have to commit?
Three people is the smallest team that behaves like a team; below that you are hiring individuals and should use contract hire instead. Most teams we build sit between three and ten engineers including a tech lead. The model is built for work measured in quarters, because the payback comes from people who learn your domain and stay in it. If your need is two developers for six weeks, this page is the wrong page and we will say so on the call.
Is there a trial period before the team is committed to?
Every engagement starts with a 14-day risk-free trial — you pay only if you are satisfied. The team joins your standup, your board and your review queue from day one, so the first fortnight produces merged work rather than onboarding notes. Velocity, code review quality and communication are all visible by the end of it.