Dedicated Teams
Named full-time engineers who join your standups, work in your repositories, and stay long enough to know your systems as well as the people who built them.
You have a date, a roadmap and about half the people you need. Recruitment is running and it is not running fast enough. The usual alternative is a supplier who bills by the head and sends whoever came free last week: capable people, no memory of your system, swapped out without warning. What you want instead is engineers who stay long enough to be useful, and who answer to your tech lead.
Context is the thing you are actually buying
A new engineer's first weeks go on learning why the billing service has two code paths and which of the nightly jobs can be safely re-run. That knowledge is expensive to build and free to lose. Keeping the same people across phases is what stops you paying for it twice.
- The same named people, introduced before they start and not swapped quietly
- In your standups and your repositories, not reporting in from outside
- Accountable to your tech lead on technical direction and on quality
- Notice and ramp-down agreed in writing at the start, in both directions
Pick the model, not the headcount
Most conversations about this start with a number of people. What decides the shape is who sets priorities, whether you have a lead with the capacity to direct extra engineers, and what you want to be true when the engagement ends. If you would rather hand over a problem and receive a finished system, an embedded team is not the arrangement you want.
The trade-off is real. An engineer embedded in your squad is cheap to direct and hard to hold to a delivery commitment, because you are setting the work. A self-contained team with its own lead can carry a commitment, but it needs a slice of the roadmap it can own without waiting on you for every decision. Neither is the safer choice in general; they fail in different directions.
How the models differ
| Model | Best when | Who directs | How it ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embedded engineer | You have a lead and not enough hands | Your squad lead | Agreed ramp-down, or a rolling extension |
| Self-contained team | A whole area of the roadmap needs owning | Our lead, against your priorities | Handover of the area, runbooks included |
| Named specialist | One problem is blocking everything else | Whoever owns the problem | Ends when the problem does |
| Bridge team | You are hiring but the date is fixed | Your engineering manager | Shrinks as your own hires arrive |
| Transfer team | You want the capability permanently in-house | Us first, then you | People move onto your payroll |
What you get in practice
The parts that decide whether an embedded team works are unglamorous: who you meet before you commit, how the work is directed day to day, and what stays behind.
You meet them first
Interviews with the engineers themselves, not a capability deck. If the person you assess is not the person who starts, you have been sold something different.
Code and accounts stay yours
Everything is built in your repositories and your cloud accounts, and you own it from the first commit. There is no vendor environment for anyone to extract work from later.
Inside your process, not beside it
Your board, your standups, your definition of done. We would rather argue in your planning meeting than send a status report that nobody reads.
Decisions written down as you go
Architecture decisions get recorded with the options that were considered and rejected, in your repository. When the team changes, or ends, the reasoning is still there to argue with.
The awkward questions
You interview them. We put forward named engineers with their real background, you assess them the way you would assess a hire, and you can say no. If the person you approved cannot start, we tell you before the engagement begins rather than substituting someone of similar seniority and hoping the difference does not show.
Not sure which one you need?
Describe the problem in a paragraph and we will tell you which service applies.