01
The roadmap outran the org chart
Funding landed, commitments were made, and hiring senior engineers is running at six months per seat. The roadmap needs a team this quarter, not next year.
Services
Dedicated development teams
Hiring a senior team takes six months you don't have; staff augmentation gives you hours without ownership. A dedicated QuantmHill team lands in weeks, works inside your process and tools, and takes responsibility for outcomes — with a named tech lead accountable to you.
Who this is for
You’ll recognize the situation
02
Staff augmentation gave you bodies, not a team
The contractors bill hours and wait for tickets. Nobody owns an outcome, your leads spend their week writing specs for strangers, and velocity somehow went down.
03
A critical initiative has no home
The new product line or platform migration matters too much to staff with whoever's free — and pulling your best people onto it stalls everything they leave behind.
What’s included
Dedicated teams, itemized
Team design and composition
A team shaped to the mission — typically a tech lead plus three to five senior engineers — proposed with named people and CVs, not role descriptions.
A tech lead accountable to you
One named person owns delivery, reports in your leadership meetings, and answers for the team's output — you never manage individual contractors.
Your tools, your process
The team works in your repos, your tracker, your Slack, and your standups. Where process is missing, we bring ours and write it down.
Delivery management
Milestone plans, weekly demos, and written status your stakeholders can read in two minutes — visibility without another meeting.
Knowledge transfer by default
ADRs, runbooks, and documented decisions from day one, plus pairing with your engineers — so the knowledge stays when the team eventually rolls off.
Elastic team size
Scale up for a push or down after a launch at monthly boundaries — without renegotiating the engagement or restarting the ramp-up.
How it runs
Four phases, no surprises
01
Diagnose
A week on your codebase, roadmap, and team structure — so the proposal names people and a mission, not a headcount and a rate card.
02
Plan
You interview the proposed team before anyone starts. Working agreements, overlap hours, and the first milestone are written down together.
03
Build
The team ships inside your process from week one — first production code in the first sprint, demos every week, one tech lead answerable for it all.
04
Scale
Quarterly reviews of team shape against the roadmap; grow, shrink, or wind down at monthly boundaries with knowledge already documented.
3 wks
median time from signature to first commit
2.8 yrs
average client engagement length
0
junior engineers billed to clients, ever
Illustrative figures from anonymized engagement profiles.
Case study
What that looks like shipped
A 14-clinic outpatient network was drowning in faxed referrals. A HIPAA-conscious LLM pipeline — with a human reviewing every record — cut intake handling time 71%.
Read the full case study
In depth
How a dedicated software team ramps, week by week
The team you get is deliberately small: a tech lead plus three to five senior engineers, with a QA engineer or designer added only when the mission calls for one. That shape is not arbitrary. It is small enough to run on one standup and one shared context, and senior enough that nobody is learning fundamentals on your budget. The tech lead writes code most days — a working lead, not a delivery manager narrating a Gantt chart.
The ramp starts before the contract does. During the diagnose week, the proposed team reads your codebase, roadmap, and architecture notes under NDA with read-only access, and you interview every named person before anyone starts. Week one then exercises the pipeline end to end: accounts and environments on day one, and a first pull request merged to production that is deliberately small — a bug fix or a thin slice of the first milestone — because its job is to prove that access, CI, review conventions, and deploys all work before anything large depends on them.
In weeks two through four the team takes full stories, and your engineers review every pull request — not as a gate, but to calibrate the pod to your standards while the cost of correction is still low. Demos run weekly from the first sprint. Week six is the target we plan against: the team carries a full lane at full velocity, and review narrows from every change to spot-checks at the architecture boundary. When external teams stall, it is rarely talent — it is skipped ramp mechanics, which is why the plan we sign includes the first-commit date.
Who answers when a sprint slips
The division of labor is written down before kickoff. You own the what and the why — priorities, acceptance, product decisions. The team owns the how, inside guardrails you set: a shared definition of done, joint architecture reviews for anything that crosses the pod's boundary, and an ADR for every decision worth remembering, kept in your repository where your engineers can challenge it.
Visibility runs on a written weekly delivery report — shipped, in progress, blocked, decisions made, risks ahead. It takes five minutes to read and is hard to fake for more than a week or two, which is the point: drift surfaces in week two instead of month four. The intake team in the healthcare case study above ran on exactly this cadence for the length of the build, including through two compliance reviews.
And when a sprint slips, the tech lead answers for it in your leadership meeting — with a cause and a correction, not a search for which contractor to blame. That is the practical difference from staff augmentation, where the vendor's responsibility ends at supplying good people. The tradeoff is real and worth naming: delegating the how means knowledge accumulates inside the pod, so documentation and pairing with your engineers are contracted deliverables, not favors. The context has to outlive the engagement.
The cost math: hire a dedicated development team or build in-house
Building in-house, the ledger reads: recruiter fees that typically run 20–25% of first-year salary per senior hire, roughly six months per seat to fill, and a fully loaded cost that commonly lands between $180,000 and $240,000 per engineer per year. A team of five takes six to nine months of calendar before it exists as a team, with mis-hire risk on every seat. If the capability is permanent and core to your product, that is still the right investment — the problem is the two quarters of roadmap that will not wait for it.
Staff augmentation typically prices per line item at $60–$110 per hour for a senior engineer, which looks cheaper until you count the management tax: a common rule of thumb puts each augmented engineer at 15–20% of a tech lead you already pay, so four of them quietly absorb most of one senior person. Vendors commonly quote a dedicated pod of four to five at $45,000–$75,000 per month with the tech lead included in the price — the management load moves onto the vendor instead of your org chart.
The honest version: a dedicated development team is not always the cheaper answer. If you have a lead with genuine spare bandwidth and well-specified work, augmentation wins on cost and simplicity. If the work spans quarters and management attention is your binding constraint, the dedicated model wins even at a higher sticker price — and because the team scales at monthly boundaries, shrinking after a launch costs a conversation, not severance and backfill. We walk through the full stage-by-stage comparison, failure modes included, in our dedicated team vs staff augmentation guide at /blog/dedicated-development-team-vs-staff-augmentation.
Tools we reach for
A boring, hireable stack
Chosen so your team can maintain, extend, and hire for everything we leave behind.
- TypeScript
- React
- Node.js
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
FAQ
The questions buyers actually ask
Answered the way we’d answer them on a call — specifics included.
A flat monthly rate per person, all-inclusive — no overtime, no bench fees, no surprise line items. You see the rate per named engineer before you commit, and the invoice is the same every month until you change the team size at a monthly boundary.
You do. The team works in your repositories under your accounts from day one, and the contract assigns all IP to you on payment. Billing is monthly, so nothing the team writes is ever more than a month from being formally yours — and if the engagement winds down, settling the final invoice transfers everything written to date.
A guaranteed minimum of four hours with your working day, per person, in the contract. Standups run in your morning, and the tech lead keeps wider availability for leadership syncs. We staff for your timezone at proposal time — not after you've signed.
First production code lands in the first sprint. The diagnose week before kickoff means the team arrives having read your code and roadmap, and because everyone is senior, nobody is learning fundamentals on your budget. Ramp-up is measured in weeks — we publish the first-commit date in the plan.
Team members work under your SSO with least-privilege access you control and can revoke instantly. Devices are managed and encrypted, we sign your NDA and DPA per person if needed, and we operate inside SOC 2 and ISO 27001 environments routinely — including your security training if you require it.
Tell the tech lead — or us directly — and we replace the person within two weeks at our cost, including handover time. If the whole engagement isn't working, you can wind down at any monthly boundary with 30 days' notice. Documentation-by-default means whoever inherits the work inherits the context too.
Handover starts on day one, not in the final sprint. ADRs, runbooks, and documented decisions accumulate in your repositories throughout the engagement, so the last month is spent pairing your engineers into ownership rather than backfilling documentation. We name a knowledge owner for each system the team built, run handover sessions against the runbooks, and stay reachable for questions for 30 days after roll-off at no charge. Ask any vendor to describe their exit this concretely — a vague answer is itself the answer.
Yes, and it is written into the contract rather than negotiated after the fact. After twelve months on your engagement you can convert any team member to a direct hire for a flat conversion fee that steps down over time. We would rather put that clause in writing than let lock-in do our retention work. In practice it happens rarely — most of our engineers prefer varied missions — but when an engineer and a client are an obvious fit, blocking the move serves nobody.
Yes. The proposal names real people with CVs, you interview each of them before kickoff, and nobody is substituted after signature. We do not rotate engineers across clients to cover bench gaps — continuity is most of what you are paying for. If someone leaves QuantmHill or is out long-term, the replacement goes through the same interview with you and overlaps with the outgoing engineer for handover, at our cost.
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