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.
For businesses in the UK, the US and the Gulf. Agree your team, delivery responsibilities, working-hour overlap and data-residency needs during discovery.
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:
Engineers on keyboard within a week.
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.
The same one-week sequence, every time.
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 in 72 hours.
We send three to five vetted CVs with trial-task outputs. Each one is someone we'd hire ourselves. You pick 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.
Day one is on your stack, in your tools, shadowing your team. Week one they're shipping small PRs. Week two they're owning workstreams.
Quarterly calibration.
Every quarter we review fit, scope, and rate. Extend, resize, or swap with 30 days' notice. No redundancy cost borne by you.
Which one fits
your commitment?
Three commercial shapes, one engineering standard. Pick the model that fits the problem, or ask us and we'll suggest one.
Quick heuristic. Pick Dedicated Teams when you own the product and want a cross-functional pod running a roadmap. Pick an Offshore Development Centre when you need a long-running engineering arm in-region with governance at scale. Pick Staff Augmentation when your team is the driver and you need specific seniors plugged in for weeks, not quarters.
Questions about staff augmentation.
Can't find what you're looking for? Email hello@cloudini.co and we'll reply within one working day.
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 suits both. The minimum is four weeks and there's no upper bound. Many of our engagements start short-term and convert to long-term as trust builds. Some have run six-plus years.
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.
Start with a 45-minute scoping call. You'll see a shortlist within a few working days, interview the following week, and have a hire on keyboard within two weeks. For common roles we've placed faster. For niche specialisms, plan for a slightly longer timeline.
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. Eighteen years of cross-sector experience means the engineers you get have usually seen your problem before.
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.
Let's build from here.
Thirty minutes with an engineer who builds. No sales, no drip campaign. If we're the wrong fit we'll tell you and point you somewhere better.