Offshore developers and offshore development teams: a practical guide
Offshore development means building software with engineers who live in another country. Teams choose it when the roadmap is longer than the local hiring pipeline, or when a skill is rare in their own city. With DigiWorks you hire offshore and nearshore developers directly into your team. They work only for you, and we do the finding, the vetting, the contract and the monthly pay. This page explains what that looks like, how it differs from the other routes and what to prepare before the first developer starts.
What an offshore development team with DigiWorks is
Think of it as extending your engineering team across a border. The developers sit in your Slack, open pull requests in your repository and pick up tickets from your board. You decide the priorities and review the work. DigiWorks sits in the background: we search, screen and shortlist, and once you choose, we handle the paperwork and payment. A team can be one engineer today and four next quarter, and nobody is shared with another client’s project.
Offshore, nearshore and onshore explained
The three words describe distance from you. Onshore is your own country. Nearshore is a neighbouring or nearby country, so the clocks are close and most of the day overlaps. Offshore is farther away, where overlap is smaller but a second shift of work can run while your office sleeps. If you want to hire nearshore developers, give us your time zone and we look for people whose day lines up with yours. Our longer guide to an offshore development team compares the models side by side.
Which regions we hire from
DigiWorks developers are based in Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Africa, the Philippines and India. For a US team, Latin America is the closest match on the clock. Eastern Europe and South Africa fit European teams well, and Eastern Europe also reaches into the US morning. The Philippines and India suit teams that want progress overnight, so the pull request is waiting when they sit down. Region is a trade between overlap and spread, so we ask for your hours before we ask for your budget.
Offshore development companies or a dedicated developer?
An offshore development company sells you a delivered project. Its own manager assigns people, and you get status reports and a release. That can suit a fixed scope that you do not want to supervise. A dedicated developer is closer to a colleague: you talk to them directly, you see their code every day and you can change direction in a stand-up. If you are weighing both, the point to test is how much control you want over who touches your code. When the need is a whole function, such as running IT for the business, look at our IT outsourcing service instead.
Roles for offshore IT development
You can fill most of a product team this way. Start with a software developer for general feature work, or split the load between a back-end developer for services and data and a front-end developer for the interface. A full-stack developer suits a small team that needs one person across both. Mobile apps call for an Android developer or an iOS developer. A QA engineer checks each release, a DevOps engineer looks after pipelines and hosting, and a project manager keeps tickets moving across the time gap.
How the team works with yours
Treat the new developer as a teammate from the first hour. Add them to the repository, the board and the team channel, and name one person who reviews their pull requests in week one. Pair them with an existing engineer for the first task, and pick something small that still ships to a real user. Share your coding style, branch rules and release steps in writing. Within a few weeks most teams stop noticing where a person sits, because the work is visible in the same places.
Working across time zones
Distance becomes a problem only when nobody has planned for it. Agree a core window of shared hours for stand-up and questions. Outside that window, lean on written handovers: what was done, what is blocked, what is next. Put the hours in the contract and the sprint plan so the arrangement is clear to everyone. Questions that wait overnight are cheaper than meetings at odd hours, as long as tickets are specific enough to act on alone.
Starting small and growing
You do not have to commit to a full team up front. Part-time begins from 20 hours a week, so you can try one developer on a real task before you decide. If it goes well, add hours, then people. Plenty of teams grow in steps: first a developer, then a tester, then a second developer for a new product line. Our remote staffing page covers hiring for roles beyond engineering.
What it costs
Hourly rates start from $7/hr. Where you land depends on the stack, the seniority and the weekly hours, and rarer skills and more experienced engineers cost more. Your invoice shows what the developer earns and what DigiWorks charges as separate lines. You also skip office space, equipment and setting up payroll in another country. We share pricing for your exact need on the first call. For the wider picture of costs and risks, see our offshore outsourcing ROI guide.
The steps from brief to first sprint
- Tell us the stack, the work ahead, the hours you can share and how many developers you want.
- We screen candidates and send you a shortlist, usually within 7 days.
- You interview the shortlist for free and pick your developer.
- We prepare the contract and handle pay every month.
- You grant access, hand over the first tickets and begin the first sprint.
From there you run the daily work. If the fit is wrong or your needs change, talk to us and we adjust the hours or the person.
Signs an offshore team is a good fit
- Your roadmap runs for months and has more tasks than your team can take.
- Searches for local engineers have stalled, or the skill is rare near you.
- You want progress to continue while your own office is closed.
- You would like to add capacity without a long recruiting cycle.
- You want to test the model on part-time hours before going further.
Work that needs a person physically present, such as handling hardware that cannot be shipped, is a poor match for that part of the job. The software around it can still be built remotely.
Questions to settle before you hire
- What will the developer own, and how will you judge the result?
- Which hours must overlap, and which can run unattended?
- What repositories, environments and tools do they need, and what is safe to share?
- Who reviews their code and answers questions during the first month?
- What signals would make you add hours or change the setup?
Rough answers are enough to start. Bring what you have to the call and we will fill in the gaps together.
Common mistakes
- Starting without any task list, so the new developer waits for direction.
- Treating time zones as a detail until a key meeting is missed.
- Handing over every system and secret in the first week.
- Measuring the first days by speed and not by how well the developer follows your process.
- Letting code review slip because the reviewer is in another country.
Day to day habits matter more than the map. Our article on managing offshore teams effectively covers them in more depth.