- Melbourne · New Delhi
- 10 years (since 2016)
- AEST overlap (4–6 business hours)
- AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2)
Three ways to work with us. Sometimes four.
The right engagement model depends on what you already own — the strategy, the team, the runway, the codebase — and what you would rather not own. Most engagements start in one mode and shift as the work shape changes. We do not lock you into a 12-month minimum to find that out.
This page describes how each model actually works in practice: what you get, what you keep, how long onboarding takes, what we charge for, and where the trade-offs sit. If you only have time to read one section, scroll to How to pick below — it covers the decision in a table.
How to pick
| If you have… | And you need… | The right model is… |
|---|---|---|
| A defined product or platform to ship, but no internal engineering team — or one that is fully booked | Someone to own end-to-end delivery against a roadmap and an outcome | Outsourcing |
| An engineering team that is at capacity, and a CTO or VP Engineering who runs sprints | 2–8 senior engineers to plug in for a quarter or longer | Staff Augmentation |
| A strategic decision to make — build vs buy, modernise vs replace, AI use case validation, cloud migration go/no-go | An independent recommendation backed by enough evidence for a board | Tech Consulting |
| An existing platform that needs ongoing capability you cannot justify hiring permanently for | A small dedicated pod that learns your code and stays on it | Dedicated Team |
If the answer is “more than one of these”, that is normal. Many engagements start as Tech Consulting, scope a recommendation in 4–6 weeks, then convert to Outsourcing or a Dedicated Team for delivery. Staff Augmentation engagements often add a Tech Consulting deliverable in parallel for an architecture or platform decision the augmented team needs resolved.
Prefer to answer a few questions?
Model 1 · Outsourcing (Outcome-Based Delivery)
We own the delivery. You own the product.
You have a defined product or platform to build — or modernise — and you would rather not staff up an internal engineering team for it. You want a single accountable partner producing working software against a roadmap, with QA and DevOps included rather than line-itemed separately.
What you get
- A delivery pod of 4–8 engineers calibrated to the work shape: a Tech Lead, a mix of senior and mid-level engineers, and a dedicated QA engineer from day one. Pods scale up or down between phases.
- A written architecture decision record (ADR) signed off by both sides before code starts — the contract for what is being built, why this stack, and which trade-offs we accepted.
- Fortnightly demos on working software, sprint reviews at the end of each phase, and a written outcome report against the agreed acceptance criteria.
- Production observability from day one — OpenTelemetry instrumentation, structured logging, dashboards in Grafana or Datadog, and runbooks for the failure modes we know about.
What you keep
- Full ownership of source code. Your Git org, your branches, your deploys, from commit one.
- Full ownership of the cloud accounts. We deploy into your AWS, Azure, or GCP — we do not run shadow accounts on your behalf.
- All IP, including custom components and any models we train. 100% yours. The MSA confirms this in writing.
- The right to take the codebase to another partner — or in-house — at the end of any phase. We document the handover.
Onboarding timeline. Typically 2–3 weeks from signed SOW to first sprint demo. That includes ADR sign-off, environment provisioning in your cloud, CI/CD wiring, and observability bring-up. We do not bill for onboarding overhead.
Pricing posture.Fixed-scope per phase with milestone-based invoicing. We share rate cards under NDA and quote phases against your roadmap. There is no commission, no body-shop markup tied to engineer count, and no “minimum 12-month” gate.
Recent example. A mid-sized European coffee importer engaged us for a 9-month Odoo ERP implementation with EUDR compliance built directly into the procurement workflow. Outcomes after deployment: sales cycle from ~5 days to ~2 days, inventory accuracy from 87% to 99.1%, order accuracy above 99% in post-deployment audits, 94% supplier documentation coverage within 6 months. Read the full case study →
Model 2 · Staff Augmentation (Embedded Engineers)
You own the delivery. We add the engineers.
You have a CTO or VP Engineering running sprints, and a team that is at capacity. You need senior talent — or a specific skill set — that is hard to recruit locally, slow to onboard, or seasonal in demand. You want engineers who integrate with your team rather than a managed service alongside it.
What you get
- Vetted engineers — typically 6+ years of experience, profile-matched to your stack and the work shape — placed inside your Slack, your Jira, your Git, your standups.
- A 30-day replacement commitment in writing. If a placed engineer is not a fit within the first 30 days, we replace at no additional cost.
- A nominated engagement lead on our side for performance, leave, and HR conversations — so you are not running an offshore HR function.
- Profiles in skill-shortage AU roles — Playwright/Cypress automation engineers, XCUITest and Espresso mobile specialists, AWS Solutions Architects, k6/JMeter performance engineers, Burp Suite security testers, Databricks/PySpark data engineers, agentic AI and RAG specialists.
What you keep
- Day-to-day direction. You set sprint goals, run standups, assign tickets, do code review.
- All deliverables, IP, and source code. Engineers work in your Git org. Standard NDA + IP-assignment clauses sit inside the engagement contract.
- The right to extend, reduce, or end the engagement at any 30-day mark with notice.
Onboarding timeline. 5–10 business days from accepted profile to first PR. We pre-screen for AU communication norms and time-zone discipline; if your stack is unusual we add a 1-week paid trial sprint at our cost before billing begins.
Pricing posture. Monthly rate per engineer, by role and seniority. Includes laptop, IT, leave cover, HR overhead, and our engagement-lead supervision. Our Melbourne page notes the headline range — senior engineering talent at roughly 40–60% of equivalent Australian rates for comparable seniority. We share exact rate cards under NDA.
When this model is wrong for you. If you do not have an internal CTO or senior engineering manager available to run sprint cadence, staff augmentation will under-deliver. In that case, choose Outsourcing or a Dedicated Team.
Model 3 · Tech Consulting (Architecture & Strategy)
We answer the specific decision on your plate. In writing.
You have a decision a CXO or CTO needs to make in the next 4–8 weeks. Build or buy this capability? Modernise this legacy system or replace it? Move to microservices or stay on the modular monolith? Is this AI use case real or hype? Each engagement is scoped around one or two of those decisions, with a written recommendation backed by enough evidence that a technical board could review it.
What you get
- A scoped deliverable — architecture decision record, gap analysis, capability matrix, costed roadmap — written in your Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, or Microsoft 365, whichever your team already uses. No proprietary deliverable templates we insist on.
- A written recommendation we would be willing to implement ourselves if you asked. If we recommend “do not build this”, we say so.
- A 30-day and 90-day follow-up review post-delivery, at no extra charge, to check the recommendation against what your team encountered in execution.
What you keep
- The deliverable. Yours to share with the board, with another vendor, with your internal team.
- The right to take any implementation work to another partner. We are not gating the recommendation behind a delivery contract.
Engagement length. Typically 4–8 weeks fixed-scope per decision. Discovery, evidence-gathering, draft, review, final. We do not generate consulting volume to justify fees.
Pricing posture. Fixed price per deliverable, quoted from the SOW. Not by hour, not by deck page count.
Sample artefact. A redacted Architecture Decision Record for a strangler-fig ERP cutover on an EUDR engagement — shows the level of detail we bring to a written recommendation.
Model 4 · Dedicated Team (Pod)
A persistent pod that learns your codebase and stays on it.
You have an existing platform — internal tooling, a SaaS product, a data pipeline — that needs ongoing capability. The work is steady but not full-time hire material. You want one team that builds context over time rather than a rotating staff-aug bench.
What you get
- A persistent pod (typically 3–6 engineers including a Tech Lead and a QA engineer) assigned exclusively to your platform.
- The same engineers across quarters, with a documented succession plan if anyone moves on.
- Quarterly business reviews against a roadmap you own — we plan the work with you, we do not pitch new modules to extend our scope.
What you keep
- All the standard items: IP, source code, cloud accounts, deployment access.
- The right to ramp the pod up or down at quarter boundaries.
Onboarding timeline. 3–4 weeks for the pod to reach steady-state productivity. We invest in the first sprint to codify your conventions, observability stack, and release runbooks in your wiki — that work pays back across every subsequent sprint.
Pricing posture. Monthly retainer per pod, quoted by composition. Includes a small unbilled buffer for production incident response.
What stays consistent across every model
Six things we do not vary by engagement model.
- Source code in your Git org from day one.No staging in our infrastructure, no waiting for handover, no “we’ll transfer it at the end”.
- Deploys to your cloud account. AWS Sydney (
ap-southeast-2) by default for Australian clients; AWS Melbourne (ap-southeast-4), Azure Australia East, or GCPaustralia-southeast1available where Victorian government, sovereignty, or workload location dictates. - IP ownership.100% yours from the moment code is written. Standard MSA includes a clean IP-assignment clause; no carve-outs for “our framework code”.
- Data handling under Australian regulation. Personal information is handled in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principle 8 (cross-border disclosure of personal information; 2024 reforms reflected in our data-handling agreements). Infrastructure baselines follow the ACSC Essential Eight maturity model.
- Communication cadence. Daily standups between 09:00–11:00 AEST (AEDT in summer). Sprint reviews, retros, and ad-hoc calls scheduled inside your business day. Asynchronous comms in your Slack or Teams channel; we do not require you to use ours.
- NDA before SOW. Standard NDA signed before scoping discussions; MSA and SOW signed before any work begins. Our standard NDA and MSA are short, plain-English documents — counsel-friendly and amendable.
Pricing posture (the part most pages skip)
We will not put rate cards on a public page. Not because we are hiding them — because our pricing varies materially by role seniority, engagement length, region overlap requirements, and on-call coverage. A senior Databricks engineer on a quarterly engagement is priced differently from a junior automation tester on a 12-month team extension.
What we will do, in the first 30 minutes of a scoping call:
- Share the relevant rate-card section under NDA.
- Quote a target monthly burn for the pod composition we would propose.
- Tell you in writing if your budget is unworkable for the outcome you need, before either of us invests further time.
That last point is the one most outsourced delivery partners avoid. We surface mismatches early because the alternative — accepting an under-priced engagement and slow-rolling it — is worse for everyone.
Switching between models mid-engagement
The clearest indicator that an engagement is mis-modelled is that the conversation in standup keeps drifting outside the model’s scope. Examples we have hit:
- A Tech Consulting engagement that finishes its written recommendation, and the customer asks us to build the migration — convert to Outsourcing, transfer artefacts and ADRs into the SOW, keep the same lead architect across the boundary.
- A Staff Augmentationengagement where the augmented engineers end up making product decisions because the internal team can’t keep up with them — convert to Outsourcing or a Dedicated Team, transfer accountability formally, re-baseline the SOW.
- A Dedicated Team engagement that needs a one-off architecture decision the pod is too close to make objectively — bolt on a 4-week Tech Consulting deliverable from a separate architect, run in parallel.
Switching is paperwork, not friction. We treat it as a normal part of the engagement lifecycle, not a renegotiation.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I pick the right engagement model?
- The decision matrix on this page is the short version. The longer version is the scoping call — 30 minutes, no obligation. We ask about your existing team, your decision timeline, and your ownership preferences, then recommend one of the four models (or a combination). Some scoping calls end with us recommending you hire permanently rather than engage us — we say so when it is the right call.
- How quickly can engineers be onboarded?
- Outsourcing: 2–3 weeks from signed SOW to first sprint demo. Staff Augmentation: 5–10 business days from accepted profile to first PR. Tech Consulting: 1 week from signed SOW to discovery kick-off. Dedicated Team: 3–4 weeks to steady-state productivity.
- Who owns the IP and source code?
- You do, from the first commit. The MSA contains a clean IP-assignment clause with no carve-outs for “framework code” or “shared components”. Source code lives in your Git organisation; we work in branches inside it.
- Can I shift between models mid-engagement?
- Yes. Many engagements start as Tech Consulting and convert to Outsourcing or a Dedicated Team for delivery. We treat model changes as a normal part of the lifecycle — paperwork, not friction.
- Where does my data live?
- By default, in AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2) for Australian clients. AWS Melbourne (ap-southeast-4 — launched January 2023 with three Availability Zones), Azure Australia East, and GCP australia-southeast1 are available where your workload location requires it. We do not store production data in our infrastructure.
- What about Australian regulatory compliance — Privacy Act, Essential Eight, CPS 234?
- Personal data is handled under the Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principle 8 (cross-border disclosure). Infrastructure baselines follow the ACSC Essential Eight maturity model. CPS 234 applies to APRA-regulated entities; for those engagements we map the relevant controls into your existing CPS 234 attestation framework rather than running a parallel one.
- How do you handle confidentiality before signing?
- NDA first, then scoping discussion, then MSA and SOW. Our standard NDA is short and amendable. We do not ask for source code or architecture detail until the NDA is in place.
- Do you require a minimum engagement length?
- No model has a contractual minimum. Outsourcing engagements are quoted per phase; Staff Augmentation runs on 30-day notice; Tech Consulting is fixed-scope per deliverable; Dedicated Team is a quarterly retainer with a 30-day off-ramp at quarter boundaries.
- What happens if a placed engineer is the wrong fit?
- For Staff Augmentation we commit to replacing a placed engineer who is not a fit within the first 30 days, at no additional cost. For Outsourcing and Dedicated Team, the engagement lead handles team composition adjustments without re-papering the SOW.
Ready to scope an engagement?
Tell us what you are trying to ship, who is on your team today, and what timeline you are working to. 30 minutes is enough for us to recommend a model — or to tell you, in writing, that we are not the right partner for what you need.