What Is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation means adding vetted engineers who work inside your existing team, tools, and repository, rather than handing a project to an outside agency that builds it in its own stack and hands you a finished thing later. The engineers show up in your standups, commit to your repo, and answer to your roadmap.

## The core difference: whose process you're running

An outsourced project runs on the vendor's process. The vendor scopes it, staffs it internally, builds it in its own environment, and delivers a result at the end, often with a statement of work and change orders if anything shifts. You get a deliverable. You do not get engineers inside your team day to day.

Staff augmentation flips that. The engineers join your process: your repository, your ticketing system, your deploy pipeline, your standups. They write code that lands as pull requests in your codebase, reviewed against your standards. The work looks like it came from your own team, because functionally it did.

A full-time hire is a third option, and it is not staff augmentation either. A hire is permanent headcount: recruiting, a salary line, benefits, ramp time, and a person who is yours indefinitely (or until they leave). Staff augmentation is capacity you can turn on and scale down without a hiring cycle in either direction.

| Model | Whose process | Commitment | Ramp time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outsourced project | Vendor's team, vendor's environment | Fixed scope, SOW, change orders | Weeks to months before delivery |
| Full-time hire | Your team, your process | Permanent, salary + benefits | 3-6 months to hire, then onboarding |
| Staff augmentation (pod) | Your team, your process | Month-to-month, cancel with notice | Days |

## What this looks like as a pod

Our version of staff augmentation is a **pod**: a named lead plus a bench of senior engineers, sized to the work and billed as a flat monthly subscription rather than hours. There are three sizes:

- **Builder Pod, $5,000/month.** One active build track, a pod lead plus a two-engineer bench, weekly ship plus async updates, a sprint roadmap.
- **Growth Pod, $10,000/month.** Two concurrent build tracks, a pod lead plus a three-engineer bench, weekly ship plus bi-weekly strategy calls, architecture planning, a hosting discount, priority support.
- **Enterprise Organization Pod, custom pricing.** Three or more parallel build tracks across departments, a dedicated senior lead plus 3-8 engineers, executive roadmap reviews, architecture ownership, hosting included, priority SLA.

All three are month-to-month with a 30-day cancellation notice. There is no per-hour billing and no change-order process for ongoing work: a paused month is not billed, and the seat is held. Full detail on each tier lives on the [pods page](/pods), and the exact numbers match the [pricing page](/pricing).

## Why the cost math is different from hiring

A single loaded US senior engineer runs roughly $250,000 a year or more once you count salary, benefits, and recruiting, and that figure is an estimate that swings with seniority and region, not a fixed price. A Builder Pod starts at $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year, for a lead plus a two-engineer bench, three people working inside your repository rather than one. The comparison is not one engineer versus one engineer; it is a full year of hiring risk and overhead versus a subscription you can cancel with 30 days notice if the fit is wrong.

## Why the speed is different

A typical in-house hiring cycle for a senior engineer runs three to six months, counting the search, interviews, offer negotiation, and notice period at their current job. A matched pod is working within five business days of a scoping session, and first shipped work lands in week one or two. That is not a marketing number; it is how the [process is structured](/how-it-works): a single scoping session, a free clickable prototype for approval, then the pod starts and ships weekly from there.

Part of why this holds up is the team's own schedule. We work out of Orange County, California and Prishtina, Kosovo, on Central European time, so a US morning stand-up is reviewing work that shipped and was tested overnight rather than waiting for a single time zone to wake up.

## Who owns the code when the engagement ends

Everything we build lands in your own repository and your own cloud account or VPC from week one. There is no license-back, no proprietary framework you depend on, and no service that only we can run. If the engagement ends, the system keeps running exactly as it did the day before, because nothing in it was ever licensed through us. That ownership structure is the same reason AI-assisted code goes through the same gate as any other code here: a pull request in your repository, reviewed by a named engineer, typed contracts, tests in CI, all visible to your own team as it happens.

This is also the dividing line worth checking with any vendor calling itself staff augmentation. If the code lives in the vendor's environment, or the vendor holds a license over any part of the system, that is outsourcing wearing a different label. Our [security page](/security) covers the specifics on SOC 2 Type II reporting and BAAs for regulated work, which matters more once the codebase is yours to keep.

## The short version

Staff augmentation adds engineers who work inside your team, stack, and repository, as opposed to an agency that builds in its own environment or a hire that takes months and roughly $250,000 a year in loaded cost to bring on. A pod is the current, subscription version of that idea: Builder Pod at $5,000/month, Growth Pod at $10,000/month, or a custom Enterprise pod, all month-to-month with a 30-day cancellation notice, starting inside a week, and shipping into a repository you own from day one.