IT Staff Augmentation
Senior engineers slotted into your existing team. They sit in your standups, report to your lead, push to your repo. No PM overhead, no parallel squad, just extra hands at senior level.
What Staff Augmentation Delivers
- Senior, Not Junior: You already have a strong engineering org. You have a CTO or VP Eng, you have tech leads, you have a hiring pipeline, but the pipeline is too slow for the next two quarters of roadmap. Staff augmentation gives you 1 to 4 senior engineers in 10 days, on a monthly contract, who behave like internal employees from day one. The trade-off versus a dedicated team: you keep all the management overhead in-house. The trade-off versus full-time hires: no recruiting time, no severance, no equity, no benefits admin.
- Reports to Your Tech Lead: Our engineers in staff aug do not report to an Alher Tech project manager. They take tickets from your backlog, attend your standups, follow your code-review rules, ship to your release cadence. From an org-chart standpoint they are your engineers for the duration of the contract.
- Pick This If You Have a Tech Lead: Staff augmentation is the right call if you have your own tech lead and just need extra senior hands. If you need a self-running squad with its own internal coordination, look at our dedicated team model. If you don't even have an in-house tech function, look at full outsourcing instead.
- Lower Overhead Than a Squad: You don't pay for our PM, our scrum master or our tech lead. Those costs are baked into a dedicated team. With staff augmentation you only pay for the hands actually writing code, which typically runs 20-30% cheaper per head.
- Vetting Process You Can Trust: Three filters before a CV reaches you: a 30-minute fundamentals interview, a 90-minute system design pairing, and a take-home review by one of our senior architects. Our reject rate from the inbound pool is roughly 92%.
- 15-Day Ramp-Down: Sprint priorities flipped, headcount budget shrank, the project is done. Whatever the reason, you can ramp down individual engineers with 15 days written notice. No buy-out, no termination fee. We don't punish you for being honest about what you actually need.
How We Build Your Staff Augmentation
- Role Brief Call (Free, 30 min): You tell us the role, the stack, the seniority and the start date. If we can't honestly hit the requirements we say so on the call. We don't waste your week with a fake match.
- Shortlist in 72 Hours: You get a shortlist of 2-3 named engineers, each with CV, GitHub or portfolio, references and the seat rate. No anonymous "Senior Engineer #4" profiles.
- You Run the Interview: We don't gatekeep: your tech lead interviews each candidate with your usual loop. You decide who passes. If nobody fits we send a new shortlist within 5 days.
- Contract and Onboarding: Standard MSA + per-engineer SOW, NDA, IP assignment. Engineer gets your accesses on day 1, attends standup on day 2, opens first PR by end of week 1.
- Quarterly Calibration: Once a quarter we sit down with you for a 30-minute calibration: is the engineer delivering at the level expected, are there gaps, do we need to swap or add? Honest feedback, no upsell.
High-performance stack used by global leaders
React/Next.js/Angular on the frontend and Java 21 + Spring Boot + PostgreSQL 14 on the backend: the same stack that BBVA, ING, and Netflix use for their security and performance.
Staff Augmentation: FAQ
How is staff augmentation different from a dedicated team?
Staff augmentation gives you individual senior engineers who plug into your team and report to your tech lead. A dedicated team is a self-running squad with its own tech lead and PM. Pick staff aug when you already have a strong engineering org and need extra hands; pick a dedicated team when you need a turnkey squad that ships features end-to-end. Staff aug is roughly 20-30% cheaper per head because there's no leadership layer baked in.
What's the typical contract length?
Minimum 1 month per engineer, average 9 months. Auto-renewing monthly after the first 30 days. Most clients run 2 to 4 augmented seats for 6-12 months and cycle them as projects change.
How does pricing work?
Monthly flat per engineer based on seniority and stack. Senior full-stack runs €5,500-€7,500/month, senior backend €5,500-€7,000, senior frontend €5,000-€6,500, senior DevOps/SRE €6,500-€8,500, senior data engineer €6,500-€8,500. No setup fee, no overtime billing, no markup on cloud or tooling. We invoice on the 1st of each month.
What is the minimum commitment?
One engineer for 30 days. After that, monthly auto-renewal with 15 days notice to ramp down. There is no minimum number of seats and no minimum contract length beyond the first month.
How fast can we start?
10 business days from signed contract to keyboard, on average. 3 days for shortlist, 5 days for your interview loop, 2 days for accesses and onboarding. We can do faster if you can move faster on your end.
What's your vetting process?
Three layers. (1) A 30-minute fundamentals interview by one of our seniors covering data structures, SOLID, common stack pitfalls. (2) A 90-minute system design pairing with a senior architect. (3) A take-home of 4-6 hours reviewed against our internal rubric. We reject roughly 92% of inbound candidates and only forward people we would put on a critical project ourselves.
Do augmented engineers attend our internal meetings?
Yes: daily standup, sprint planning, refinement, retro, code review and any architecture discussion they should be in. They live in your Slack and your Jira. The only meeting they skip is internal Alher Tech calibrations, which happen once a quarter.
Can we replace an engineer if it is not working?
Yes, with 7 days notice. We replace within 10 business days at no extra cost. We would much rather lose a single seat than lose a client because we forced a bad fit to stay.
Do you work with clients globally?
Yes. We work fully remote with clients across Spain, Europe, the US and LATAM. Time zones, video calls and live demos at every milestone.