1. Choose the right hiring model
Decide how you want to engage: a dedicated team for ongoing product work, staff augmentation to extend your in-house team, or project-based for a clearly-scoped build. Each suits a different need - see our engagement models.
2. Write down your requirements first
Before talking to anyone, document the tech stack, seniority and what the first 60 days look like. A precise brief makes vetting faster and prevents mismatched expectations.
A useful role brief covers:
- The product and the problem the developer will own, in two or three sentences
- The stack they will work in day to day, split into must-have and nice-to-have
- Seniority described as responsibilities - "designs a service and reviews other people's pull requests" says more than "senior"
- Who reviews their code, how much overlap you need and what tools they will use
- What a good first month looks like, in deliverables rather than adjectives
3. Decide where to hire
Offshore regions vary in cost, talent depth and overlap. Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Asia each offer strong engineering at different price points and time zones - weigh cost against how much real-time overlap you need. See typical developer rates by region.
4. Vet for skills and communication
Run a short technical assessment and a conversation that tests problem-solving and English communication. Ask what resources they use to solve hard problems, and how they've handled ambiguity and deadlines.
Make the technical evaluation look like the real job. Instead of algorithm puzzles, ask the candidate to walk through code they have written, review a short pull request taken from your codebase (with secrets removed), or talk through how they would design a feature you actually need. Clear explanation of trade-offs matters more across time zones than raw speed.
5. Run a small, paid trial task
Before committing to a longer engagement, give the shortlisted developer or team a real but contained piece of work - a small feature, a cluster of related bugs or an integration spike that fits into a week or two. Pay for it at the normal rate - unpaid test work tends to attract the wrong candidates. Judge more than whether it works: the questions asked before starting, the pull request description, how feedback was handled and whether the code follows your conventions.
6. Onboard deliberately in the first 30 days
- Week 1: accounts and access, local environment running, an architecture walkthrough and a first small change merged
- Weeks 2-3: real tickets of growing size, reviews paired with an in-house engineer, and open questions captured in a shared document
- Week 4: owns a feature end to end, joins sprint planning and updates the onboarding notes for the next person
Name one in-house person as the go-to contact. Early struggles usually come from missing context, not missing skill.
7. Manage across time zones
- Agree a few hours of daily overlap for stand-ups and reviews
- Work asynchronously - document decisions and write clear tickets
- Use shared tools (Jira, Slack, GitHub) and demo every sprint
- Measure outcomes, not hours online
8. Protect IP and security
Sign NDAs, assign IP ownership in writing, and set clear access controls. A good partner handles this proactively - it matters even more in fintech, healthcare and enterprise work. At PixoBots, an NDA is signed before kickoff and the client owns the code and IP.
Treat access as part of onboarding, not an afterthought:
- Give each developer a named account - never shared logins - protected by single sign-on and multi-factor authentication
- Grant least-privilege access: repositories and staging first, production only where a role genuinely needs it
- Keep secrets in a vault or your cloud provider's secret manager, never in code, tickets or chat
- Keep an off-boarding checklist so access is revoked the day someone leaves the project
9. Judge the engagement after 90 days
Three months is long enough to see past first impressions and short enough to change course. Review against your original brief:
- Is work finished in the sprint it was planned for, and how often does it come back from review?
- Do the developers raise problems early and propose alternatives, or wait to be told?
- How much of your in-house team's time goes on explaining and fixing - and is that falling?
- Would you hand them a harder piece of work next quarter?
If the answers are mostly yes, widen the scope. If not, raise the specific gaps with your partner - they are usually fixable once named.
Factor in AI-augmented delivery
Location sets the hourly rate; how the team works sets the number of hours. Offshore developers who work with AI tools spend fewer hours on repetitive work - boilerplate, CRUD screens, test cases and documentation - and more on the decisions that need judgement. When you vet a team, ask how they use AI and who reviews AI-assisted code before it ships.
The saving depends on your project's mix of work: routine screens and integrations benefit more than novel or legacy-heavy code. AI-assisted delivery can save more than 50% of software development cost compared with traditional development. See how AI-augmented software development works.
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