IT staff
augmentation on tap.
Senior engineers, plugged straight into your team. Same standup, same repos, same review process. Billed by the hour, resized by the sprint.
Cloudini’s registered office is in London. Team location, working hours and access requirements need to be agreed for the proposed engagement.
An engineer. Not a contract, not a pod.
Staff augmentation is the simplest model we run. You describe the skill gap. We send a short list of senior engineers who fit. You interview. They join your team on Monday. They work your hours, attend your ceremonies, and ship into your backlog.
No delivery lead, no project structure from our side. A vetted engineer billed by the hour or the day. Plus a standing commitment: if the fit is wrong, we swap them at no cost.
When one more engineer beats a new project.
Staff augmentation is the right call in specific, bounded situations. If one of these sounds like your week, the model earns its keep.
One missing skill on an in-house team.
Your team is complete, except for the one engineer who knows Rust, or Snowflake, or iOS, or SRE. One targeted hire, no restructure, no politics.
A short burst of capacity.
You've got a three-month sprint to hit a deadline and you're two engineers short. Open-market hiring takes nine months. Augmented staff are on keyboard in a week.
A trial before permanent hire.
You want to bring someone permanent but want to see them ship first. Augmented staff with a contract-to-hire clause is how a lot of our best clients started.
Coverage during parental, sabbatical, or notice.
A key engineer is out for six months. You can't leave the work open and you can't backfill permanently. Plug-in cover keeps the sprint cadence intact.
What an augmented engineer brings to your team.
The staff augmentation model is narrow on purpose. The six outcomes it's optimised for:
Shortlist, interviews, onboarding and the engineer’s start date are agreed after reviewing the role and availability.
Your management, your process, your tools.
Flexible scale up, down, or across disciplines.
No redundancy cost when the work ends.
Deep bench of specialists you can't hire alone.
Swap-at-no-cost if the fit is wrong.
Why hire from us, not a staffing shop.
Plenty of firms sell staff augmentation. The six reasons we put in the contract and our clients renew on:
Boutique communication, not a ticket queue.
You get a named partner lead. If an engineer is blocked, the pager is ours. We answer within the hour and we answer in sentences, not ticket numbers.
Top talent, vetted twice.
Every engineer on the bench goes through technical screening, paid trial work, and reference checks. We ship the CV only if we'd hire them ourselves.
Clear written communication.
Our engineers write standup notes, decision docs, and pull request descriptions like seniors. Because they are. No language barrier, no communication tax.
Cost savings that don't crater quality.
Our blended rate is structurally below local-market senior rates in London, New York, or Dubai. The work isn't cheaper because the engineers are. It's cheaper because the cost base is.
Flexibility in the commercial model.
Hourly, daily, monthly, or contract-to-hire. Resize up or down sprint-by-sprint. Notice periods that match the commitment, not an arbitrary minimum.
Diverse specialisms under one roof.
Frontend, backend, mobile, data, ML, SRE, security, product design. One partner instead of six. One contract, one invoice, one escalation path.
A clear sequence from brief to onboarding.
Staff augmentation should feel boring. The boring, predictable sequence we run every time:
Skill brief.
A 45-minute call to pin down the role. Stack, seniority, domain context, team shape, hours. You walk away with a written role brief and the rate band.
Shortlist and availability review.
We share relevant candidate profiles and agree any technical assessment with you. You choose who to interview.
Interview and approval.
You interview, we handle logistics. You approve the hire. There is no placement fee. Our margin is on the hourly rate, not the intro.
Onboarding to your team.
We agree access, tools and an initial task with your team. Pairing, review and handover responsibilities are included in the onboarding plan.
Quarterly calibration.
We review fit, scope and rates at agreed intervals. Changes to staffing, notice periods and responsibilities are recorded in the contract.
Compare responsibilities before choosing.
These models describe different working arrangements. Confirm staffing, availability, fees, access and ownership in the project agreement.
Start with the work you need done and the management responsibilities you want to retain. Review the proposed team and terms before choosing a model.
Questions about staff augmentation.
Can't find what you're looking for? Email hello@cloudini.co and we can discuss your requirements.
Staff augmentation is a model where we place vetted engineers directly into your team, reporting to your engineering manager and shipping into your repos. They attend your ceremonies and take tickets from your backlog. We handle employment, payroll, and HR. You manage the work.
We fill senior engineering roles across backend, frontend, mobile, data, ML/MLOps, SRE/DevOps, security, QA, and product design. Specifically: Go, Python, Java, Node, .NET (backend). React, Vue, Next.js (frontend). iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter (mobile). Snowflake, dbt, Airflow (data).
Staff augmentation can support a defined project or an ongoing need. The duration, review points and any minimum commitment are agreed for each engagement.
Every engineer clears two quality gates before you ever see a CV. Technical screening and a paid trial task. If an engineer misses our bar, they're off the bench. Once placed, we run monthly check-ins with you and the engineer, not to manage them, but to catch drift early.
Shortlist, interviews, onboarding and the engineer’s start date are agreed after reviewing the role and availability.
You manage the augmented engineer day-to-day. They report to your engineering manager, take tickets from your backlog, and work in your tools. Our partner lead is on call for commercial issues, escalations, or fit problems, never for day-to-day work.
The minimum is one engineer and there's no formal maximum. We've placed pods of twenty under a staff augmentation contract. If the team grows beyond about eight, the Dedicated Teams model is usually a better commercial fit.
We work across financial services, healthtech, retail and e-commerce, logistics, public sector, climate and energy, and media. We select engineers for the technical and domain requirements of your project.
AI engineers for your team.
Senior engineers who have built with LLMs, retrieval and agents, joining your standup to add AI to the product you already run.
Explore AI development- AI agent developmentAgents that plan, call your tools and hand off to people when unsure.
- Generative AI developmentText, image and document generation built into your product.
- LLM integration and RAGLanguage models wired into your systems and answering from your documents.
- AI chatbot developmentCustomer and internal assistants that answer from your own data.
- AI consultingUse-case selection, data readiness and governance before you build.
“Cloudini did some great work for Sainsbury's, bridging complex interactions between some older less flexible systems, some rigid vendor solutions and the new systems we were building. The software Cloudini developers wrote stood up well, long beyond the interim scope of it needing to work for 12-18m and was still in active use 5 years after its creation to good effect, since it was part of mission critical systems.”
Discuss your software project.
Describe the workflow, existing systems and the change you need. Use the enquiry form to discuss scope and next steps.