When your roadmap needs more engineers than your team has, a staff augmentation provider can have someone working on it within a few weeks. That's far quicker than a full-time search, but not every shortlist arrives with the same level of vetting.
For example, one provider might send engineers who passed a general coding test months ago and described their past projects themselves. Another might test each candidate's skills for your role and confirm their past work before you see a profile. That's the difference between an engineer who contributes right away and one your team spends weeks bringing up to speed.
If the engineer works out, your team will be relying on them within a few months. With some providers, they leave when the project ends and take everything they've learned about your codebase with them, so the next engineer starts from scratch. Others let you keep them, sometimes as a full-time hire, with or without a conversion fee.
The ten companies below cover short projects and long-term hires, from a single engineer who works your hours to managed teams and enterprise staffing programs.
|
Product |
Who it's for |
Key strengths |
Engagement model |
Screening approach |
Pricing |
|
Strider |
U.S. teams that need LATAM engineers on their hours now and may want to keep them long term |
Path from staff augmentation to a full-time role Shortlist within 48 hours of the intro call Named account manager after the hire |
Short- or long-term full-time, or long-term part-time, with Strider as EOR |
AI and recruiter screening, CEFR-graded English, a fit interview, and an expert technical review |
Fully loaded monthly cost per hire, nothing due until you hire |
|
BairesDev |
Companies whose roadmap will grow from one engineer into several workstreams |
4,000+ engineers on staff 100+ technologies Pods with a PM and Scrum Master |
Staff augmentation, managed pods, or outsourced delivery |
Technical, English, and critical-thinking tests with senior-engineer interviews |
Custom quote by team size, stack, roles, and scope |
|
Howdy |
Companies building a permanent LATAM team that want support beyond payroll |
Performance coaches In-person Howdy Houses Devices set up to your security standards |
Full-time, month to month, through EOR or direct contract |
Technical, English, and culture screening |
All-inclusive rate per hire, with Howdy's fee at 15% |
|
Revelo |
Teams that need an engineer within weeks but can't yet commit to the role long term |
400,000+ engineers Three to five candidates within 72 hours Month-to-month engagements |
Contractor staff augmentation through an AOR |
Technical, English, and soft-skills pre-vetting |
All-in monthly rate by seniority (about $4,700 to $10,800 a month for full-stack) |
|
TECLA |
Teams that need LATAM engineers plus part-time or interim senior leaders |
Full-time, part-time, or hourly engineers Fractional and interim U.S. leaders Success Manager on every placement |
Staff augmentation, direct hire, fractional, or interim |
AI screening, technical assessment, recruiter interview, and references |
Hourly rate ($28 to $58 on average, by seniority), or 15% to 25% of salary for direct hire |
|
Near |
Teams making several permanent hires over time |
One recruiter for every search Shortlist in three to five days, with video intros Near's payroll or your own EOR |
Staff augmentation through Near's EOR partners, or direct hire onto your payroll or EOR |
Live English interview, your coding challenge or a partner assessment, and reference checks |
Monthly invoice per engineer (staffing) or one-time placement fee (direct hire) |
|
GoGloby |
Teams that want added engineers measured against their own delivery |
Engineers measured against your own baseline Cost and return reported per shipped feature A new engineer at no cost if one misses the baseline |
Staff augmentation or direct hire |
Four-stage technical assessment |
Flat monthly fee per engineer, after a fixed-fee benchmark month |
|
Toptal |
Teams with a defined piece of work and no plan to keep the role |
Matchers from the role's own field Test projects during screening Trial of up to two weeks |
Freelance, hourly, part-time, or full-time |
Multi-stage screening with a test project |
$79/month platform subscription plus the specialist's hourly rate |
|
Andela |
Companies that want specialists from several regions on one team |
Contractors engaged in 100+ countries through its AOR Blended or fully managed teams Engineers across 135 countries |
Independent contractors in blended or fully managed teams |
English test, technical assessment, and live technical interview |
Custom quote |
|
TEKsystems |
Enterprises running many IT requisitions at once |
1,800+ recruiters organized by skill area MSP program support Workforce training |
Contract, permanent, or executive staffing, or managed services |
Screening by recruiters who specialize in each skill area |
Custom quote by engagement scope |
With Strider, the vetted LATAM engineer you bring on through staff augmentation can move into a full-time role with your company when the work outlasts the plan. Engagements start part time or as a set period of full-time work, usually three months or more, which helps cover for a parental leave, fill a seat while you search for a permanent hire, or support a three- to six-month project. Whatever the reason, the engineer joins your team and takes direction from your leads, the same as anyone you hired yourself.
Strider also stays that hire’s Employer of Record (EOR) the whole time, carrying the contract, payroll, benefits, and compliance, along with the legal risk of getting any of it wrong. That means you don't need an entity in Latin America, and moving the engineer to full time takes no new search or change of employer.
Each search begins with an intro call about the role. Strider’s AI-fit analysis then narrows its 100,000+ network to candidates at the requirements you set, and every decision after that is made by people. Recruiters question candidates on your stack to check how deep their hands-on experience goes, then interview them live on motivation, culture fit, and pay expectations. Professional English teachers also grade a recorded speaking test on the CEFR scale to make sure they can communicate effectively with your team during meetings and standups.
Within 48 hours of the intro call, you have four or five candidates. Before your final interview, a subject-matter expert walks through a real project each one shipped, probing architecture and security with live follow-ups that expose AI-generated answers, and sends you a write-up of what to explore. Your final interviews can then focus on what only your team can judge, such as how someone fits with your people and what success looks like in the role.
After the hire, a Strider account manager stays with you for the whole engagement, coordinating a pay adjustment after a promotion or a development plan when someone's work starts to slip. Behind them, Strider's customer success team handles equipment, onboarding, and periodic performance reviews. That support, with the fit screening before the hire, keeps retention on Strider hires above 90%.
Strider is best when you want your leads to direct engineers directly, and are open to turning a great fit into a long-term employee. It's less suited for short-term sprints or end-to-end project delivery, especially if you operate asynchronously.
Strider is free to start, and you only pay once a search ends in a hire. The cost of each hire is one monthly total that covers the engineer’s pay along with compliance, benefits, equipment, and management.
Strider's savings calculator gives you a monthly or annual estimate using the following information:
"Strider helped us avoid the typical hiring headaches and delivered candidates that actually made a difference in our team. Our 100% retention rate speaks for itself — the people we hired through Strider are still with us and performing at a high level." — Kyle Gashler, Engineering Manager, Zamp
"Primer needed data-savvy engineers who could build fast and think long-term. Strider delivered embedded team members who cleared a high technical bar, without Bay Area price tags or hiring overhead." — Keith Delaney, CEO and Co-founder, Primer
BairesDev’s staff augmentation service places engineers on your team in about two weeks. They come from the 4,000+ engineers BairesDev already employs across more than 20 LATAM countries, all of whom have passed its technical assessments and interviews.
Under staff augmentation, the engineers report to your own leads, and day-to-day management stays with your team. If your leads don’t have room to manage more people, BairesDev also runs managed teams, which it calls self-managing pods. Each comes with a project manager and Scrum Master who run the sprints, and the team can be resized or given a specialist as priorities change.
You can also keep some roles under your own leads and hand a separate workstream to a managed team, with both staffed by BairesDev engineers. On a managed team, though, you set priorities with the PM. Every request or change reaches the engineers through them.
BairesDev suits a company that wants some engineers reporting to its own leads and some work run by a managed team, without signing with two providers. If you only need an engineer or two under your own leads, the managed side goes unused, and a provider built around single hires is likely the closer match.
BairesDev doesn't publish its pricing. Quotes depend on team size, technology stack, roles, and project scope.
Howdy places full-time LATAM engineers inside your team, working under your own managers, on contracts that renew month to month. The model has no project end date, but it doesn’t lock you in either. You can end an engineer’s contract with 14 days’ notice, or immediately and at no charge in the first seven days.
Those contracts can run through Howdy as the engineer’s Employer of Record or as a direct contract, and either way, benefits, equipment, and local compliance come with the engineer, so you aren't arranging them separately.
Each engineer is also paired with a performance coach who has managed engineers for at least 10 years. They meet one on one to work on the engineer's career, skills, and fit with your team. Your managers keep running the work, while the coach takes on the growth conversations a remote hire would otherwise need from them.
For an engineer who'd otherwise work alone from home, Howdy Houses add an office in their city, covered by the same rate you pay for the hire. The offices, in cities from Guadalajara to Buenos Aires, run English-language programs and weekly lunches, so engineers get steady practice speaking English with peers. They only help if your engineer lives in one of those cities, though.
Howdy suits a company adding long-term LATAM hires whose managers can direct the work but don't have time to coach each one as well. If your managers already run career development for their reports, the coaching adds little. Also, a full hiring cycle usually runs four to six weeks, so Howdy isn't the option for a seat you need filled right away.
Howdy charges one all-inclusive rate per hire, shown on each candidate's profile, with no startup, recruiting, onboarding, or termination fees. The rate breaks down as follows:
Revelo adds full-time LATAM engineers to your team on month-to-month terms, so you can scale up and down as needed. When a launch ships and you need fewer engineers, you can end an engagement with no cancellation penalty.
Revelo sends three to five pre-vetted candidates within 72 hours, and you run the interviews before picking one. Their first 14 days on your team run as a trial, and you don't pay for that time if the fit isn't right.
Once hired, the engineer reports to your leads, who set the priorities and review the work, since Revelo doesn't assign a delivery manager. Revelo's part is administering the engagement as the agent of record in 18 LATAM countries, handling the local contract, invoicing, payment, and benefits administration.
That setup keeps the engineer an independent contractor, meaning they’re not an employee of you nor Revelo, so your legal or HR team has to accept that classification for as long as the engineer works with you. If you'd rather make them an employee, you can hire them directly, which triggers a recruitment fee that decreases the longer they've worked with you.
Consider Revelo when your workload often rises and falls with launches and roadmap changes, and you have leads who have time to direct each engineer themselves.
Revelo bills one all-in monthly rate per engineer that covers pay, benefits, payroll, and its hiring support. There is no fee to see or interview candidates.
TECLA places LATAM engineers full time, part time, or by the hour, with TECLA as their employer of record. Part-time and hourly work let you bring on a specialist you need two days a week without filling a full-time seat, and you can interview the first candidates within five to seven days. Once an engineer starts, a TECLA Success Manager handles their onboarding, feedback, coaching, and HR questions, so that upkeep doesn't fall to your engineering leads.
TECLA also places senior technology leaders, from CTOs to CISOs, for roles you aren't hiring for permanently. A fractional leader takes on the role part time, typically 10 to 25 hours a week. An interim leader holds the seat full time for three to six months, covering the gap until your permanent hire arrives and then onboarding them. Both are separate from the engineering placements, so you can use either with or without TECLA's engineers.
A fractional leader is part time by design, though. Decisions that need them outside their hours wait, and someone on your team covers technical calls and code reviews in between.
TECLA makes the most sense when you're adding engineers and also need senior technical leadership on a part-time or temporary basis. If your leadership team is already in place, you'd be using TECLA for engineers alone, and the leadership service that sets it apart goes unused.
Staff augmentation and direct hire are contingency-based, so you pay nothing until someone is placed. Fractional leaders bill once the engagement starts
Near recruits full-time LATAM engineers and lets you choose who employs them. Under its staffing model, Near owns the employment relationship, with Deel and Globalization Partners running payroll and compliance. Under its direct-hire model, the engineer joins your own international payroll or the EOR you already use, and Near doesn't stay on as the employer.
Each search starts from your stack and seniority, since Near doesn't keep a bench, and the first shortlist arrives within three to five days of kickoff. Recruiters interview every candidate on live video with unplanned questions, which shows how their English will hold up in a standup better than a test score would. For technical roles, Near runs the coding challenge your team already uses or a partner assessment, then checks how well candidates know your tools through references.
Once the engineer starts, Near's help covers HR and admin. It doesn't direct daily work, assign projects, or manage performance, so reviews, career development, and raises fall to your managers, with Near supplying LATAM pay benchmarks by role and country.
Near only places permanent, full-time hires, though, and screens out candidates looking for short-term contracts. If you only need an engineer until a project ships, Near would have you make a permanent hire for a temporary need.
The same permanence means the employment setup you pick at the start stays in place for as long as the engineer does. That makes Near a fit for a company that already employs LATAM staff through an EOR, since new hires join the same setup and you don't run a second payroll.
Near doesn't publish its fees. Interviews are free and nothing is due until you hire. Near quotes exact figures for your role on a discovery call.
GoGloby adds senior engineers to established software teams and measures what they deliver against your team's own numbers. Every engagement starts with a paid benchmark month, in which GoGloby connects its reporting tool to your Jira, GitHub, and AI coding tools and records how your team delivers today. That baseline becomes the bar the engineers are measured against, and it decides whether GoGloby's performance guarantee applies.
From then on, GoGloby reports the cost and return of your AI spending per shipped feature, sprint by sprint. Features are graded by complexity, so a medium feature now is compared with a medium feature three months ago. When leadership asks whether the added engineers and the AI spend are paying off, you answer with your own delivery data.
Each profile arrives with the engineer’s full record from GoGloby’s four-stage technical assessment, and you can read how they handled each stage before you choose. The stages run from writing a specification before any code to handling failures in production, and each one cuts 60% to 70% of the remaining candidates.
But the measurement isn’t optional. Every engagement opens with the benchmark month, and GoGloby’s reporting tool keeps running inside your cloud for as long as the engineers stay. The benchmark fee counts toward your first month of delivery, but the first month itself goes to measurement, so a team that needs another engineer next week waits for it to finish.
GoGloby suits an established software team that has to show leadership what its engineering spend returns, since the reporting comes with every engineer. If you only need more capacity on a team that already ships well, you'd be paying for a benchmark you don't need.
GoGloby quotes its rates on a call. Staff augmentation and direct hire are priced separately.
Toptal lets you add a freelance expert to your team for one project and close out the engagement when the project ends. The specialist works with your team the way a remote internal team member would, answering to your leads with no Toptal manager in between.
Candidates for that project usually reach you within 24 hours, because Toptal screens its network before you submit a job. Everyone in the network has been through three to eight weeks of screening, including a one- to three-week test project, and fewer than 3% of applicants make it through. A matcher who works in the role's own field hand-selects the candidates for your project.
Each engagement opens with a trial of up to two weeks, and you aren't billed for it unless you're satisfied. If the first person isn’t right, Toptal starts a new no-risk trial with someone else, up to three people per position. After the trial, the specialist works hourly, part time, or full time, and you can scale back or end the engagement as quickly as it began.
With Toptal, employment isn't part of the match. Each specialist works as an independent contractor, and EOR contracts, payroll, and benefits come through HireGlobal, a separate Toptal product. If a project becomes a standing role, Toptal can usually bring the specialist into your company for a fee.
Toptal works well for defined deliverables that need a specialized skill, like a security review or a platform migration, with your team owning the overall project once the specialist's work is complete. A role you plan to keep for years needs an arrangement outside the standard match, which makes Toptal a harder fit once you want the specialist to stay.
Toptal doesn't publish a rate card. Specialists set their own hourly rates for hourly, part-time (20 hours), or full-time (40 hours) work, with no recruiting fee or termination cost.
Andela builds engineering teams from a network spread across continents, so you can staff each role wherever the right specialist lives and put engineers from several regions on the same project. Its agent-of-record service covers contractors in more than 100 countries, which means one provider can contract and pay a team split across Kenya, Brazil, and Europe.
You also choose who runs that team day to day. In Andela’s blended model, its engineers join your teams and your engineering leads direct their work. If you’d rather hand off a whole project, Andela can put together a fully managed team that builds it for you.
Engineers who join your team through Andela work as independent contractors, with Andela acting as their AOR. It handles their contracting, onboarding, and payments and takes on the legal and worker-classification risk, so you can add an engineer in another country without opening a legal entity there.
But the same spread works against overlap. An engineer in Kenya or India shares far fewer working hours with a U.S. team than one in Brazil. That means a team drawn from several regions leans more on written handoffs than on live collaboration.
Andela makes sense when one region can’t supply the specialists you need and your team already works well asynchronously. If you'd rather keep every engineer in one region close to your own working hours, a single-region provider is the closer fit.
Andela doesn't publish its pricing or rates. Each engagement is quoted after a discovery call, based on the number of engineers and whether you or Andela manages them.
TEKsystems fills contract and permanent IT roles at enterprise volume. Requisitions can come straight from your engineering leaders or through the managed service provider (MSP) that runs your contingent workforce. Consultants work under your managers, while TEKsystems employs them and runs their payroll and benefits, checking in throughout each assignment.
TEKsystems has more than 1,800, grouped by skill area and spread across over 100 locations worldwide. Open a cloud role and a security role in the same week, and each goes to a recruiter who specializes in that skill.
If your company already buys contract labor through an MSP, TEKsystems works inside that program as one of its suppliers. More than 70 recruiters in the U.S. and India work only on MSP requisitions, and your program office gets one point of contact, so it doesn’t chase each role separately.
Contract consultants are TEKsystems employees placed on assignments with end dates, though, and it moves them on to their next project when one ends. If a consultant has become central to your project, settle the longer-term arrangement before the end date, or the person your team depends on moves on to another client.
TEKsystems is built for companies filling more IT roles at once than their own recruiters can work, including roles that already run through procurement. For a single engineer joining one product team, much of that capacity would sit unused.
TEKsystems doesn't publish its pricing. Engagements are scoped individually, from a single consultant to a full team or full-scale outsourcing.
The right type of IT staff augmentation company depends on who will manage the engineers and how long you need them. With most types, your own leads direct the work, including nearshore and offshore providers, global talent platforms, specialist firms, and freelance networks. A full-service development partner is the exception, since it runs delivery for you. Enterprises filling contract roles at volume usually go through a traditional IT staffing firm.
|
Provider type |
How it works |
Who manages the engineers? |
Typical engagement |
|
Nearshore staff augmentation |
Engineers in Latin America join your team and work U.S. business hours, and the provider sources, screens, and often employs them |
You |
Months to years, sometimes with a path to a full-time role |
|
Offshore staff augmentation |
Engineers in more distant time zones join your team, with less shared working time |
You, with more work handed off between time zones |
Months to years |
|
Global talent platforms |
A multi-country pool matched to your role, often by software |
You |
Weeks to years, depending on the contract |
|
Traditional IT staffing firms |
Recruiters fill contract and contract-to-hire roles at volume, often inside an enterprise's managed service program |
You, while the firm employs the worker |
Contract assignments, often many at once |
|
Full-service development partners |
The provider forms and manages a team that delivers the software for you |
The provider |
A project or an ongoing statement of work |
|
Specialist augmentation firms |
Engineers screened for one narrow need, such as a seniority band, a stack, or applied AI work |
You |
A project to long-term |
|
Freelance talent networks |
Independent specialists you engage directly, often by the hour |
You |
Days to months |
Once you’ve ruled out the models where the provider manages the work, narrow the rest by how long you need each engineer. Freelance networks suit days to months, while nearshore staff augmentation can keep the same person for years and sometimes offers a path to a full-time role. You can also compare remote hiring models side by side before you shortlist.
To choose an IT staff augmentation company, start with the roles you need and how long you need them. Then compare how each provider vets candidates, who manages the engineers day to day, how many working hours you’ll share, what terms the engagement runs on, and who employs the engineer once they start.
Before you contact anyone, write down each role at the seniority you need, along with any specialist skill the work depends on. A vague request looks like a fit for almost every provider. A specific one shows you quickly whether a company can source and screen for it or only offers a broad pool of IT talent. Send the same brief to every provider on your list, so the shortlists you get back are easy to compare.
Match the provider to how long you’ll need the engineer. When the work has a clear end date, a contract engagement is the simpler fit. If there's any chance you'll want to keep the engineer, ask at the start whether they can move into a full-time role, who would employ them afterward, and what happens to the existing engagement. .
For each provider, find out who runs each stage of vetting and what candidates are tested against. A general assessment passed once, before your role existed, tells you less than an interview written for your role. A written evaluation from the engineer who ran the technical interview gives your interviewers somewhere to start when you assess candidates for skills and fit. Where English matters, a grade on a named scale such as CEFR is easier to compare than a recruiter's impression.
In staff augmentation, the engineers take direction from your leads and work inside your processes, and you own the output. Once a provider forms a team and runs it through its own project manager, you're directing outcomes more than people. That suits a project you'd rather hand off and works against a role you want filled on your own team. Ask each provider who assigns the work, reviews it, and clears blockers day to day.
Once your leads are directing a remote engineer, working-hour overlap decides how much of that can happen live. If they need the engineer in standups, pair programming, and code reviews through the day, four shared hours work very differently from eight. Work that moves on written handoffs tolerates less overlap. Ask each provider for the engineer's actual working hours and check them against your team's schedule before you hire a remote developer.
Check which engagement models a provider offers and what it takes to end or scale one. Staff augmentation, contract-to-hire, a managed team, and a direct hire each set up a different relationship with the engineer. Not every provider offers all four. Ask which of them a provider offers and whether you can move from one to another, then find out what notice period and minimum term apply.
Find out who employs the engineer. It may be the provider or an employer of record working for the provider, and if the engineer works as an independent contractor, no one does. That answer decides who runs payroll, who answers for local compliance, and who ships the laptop. Then ask what happens if a hire doesn't work out in the first weeks, and what support continues once the engineer has started.
Staff augmentation engineers work inside your codebase, reviews, and standups every day. Within a few months, they’ll know your codebase, your review habits, and the reasons behind decisions nobody wrote down. By then you may want to keep them, because letting them go when the engagement ends means teaching all of that to someone new.
Strider is set up for the version of staff augmentation where you might keep that person. The engineer works your U.S. hours from inside your team. Since Strider already employs them, going full time doesn't mean a new search or change who employs them.
If that's the hire you're planning, book an intro call with a Strider hiring expert. Bring the role, the stack, and the hours you need covered, and your first shortlist of vetted candidates arrives within two days. It's free to get started and free until you hire.