Nearshore staff augmentation
Nearshore staff augmentation, without the ramp-up tax
Nearshore staff augmentation means adding senior engineers from a nearby time zone directly to your existing team, under your management, instead of outsourcing a project. Greelow engineers join your standups, your repo and your sprint board within seven business days, work 1-2 hours from US Eastern, and use Claude Code and Cursor daily.
ISO 9001 Certified
Clutch 5.0 RatedWhat is nearshore staff augmentation?
Nearshore staff augmentation is the practice of adding senior engineers from a nearby time zone to your existing team, where they report to your managers, follow your process, and work inside your sprint board - not a vendor delivering a scoped project on its own timeline.
The difference from project outsourcing is who is in charge. In staff augmentation, you set the priorities, own the architecture, and the engineer works your rituals - standups, code review, planning. In outsourcing, a vendor takes ownership of a scope and delivers it against its own plan. Staff augmentation bills one flat monthly rate per engineer; outsourcing bills against a fixed-price or milestone scope.
Need the fuller picture, or want to hire a specific person instead of augmenting a team? See how nearshore software development works at Greelow, or hire nearshore developers directly.
What is included in the monthly rate?
Senior engineer, full-time on your team
Averages 8+ years. Owns their work end to end.
AI-tool proficiency, day one
Uses Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot in daily workflow.
Contract, payroll, benefits, equipment
One legal entity, one monthly invoice.
IP assignment and NDA
Signed before day one.
30-day replacement guarantee
If it isn't working, we swap the engineer at no additional cost.
US business hours
Same-day standups. No offshore handoff.
Who is nearshore staff augmentation for?
VP Engineering at a Series B+ scaleup
You need capacity fast, and US hiring is 4–6 months of runway you don't have. You want senior engineers who plug into your Slack and your Git without weeks of ramp.
CTO at a 50–500-person tech-forward company
Your team runs on Claude and Cursor already. You want engineers who show up already fluent in those tools, not learning them on your dime.
Head of Platform Engineering
You need specialized capacity - an AI Engineer, a Staff DevOps, a Senior Data Engineer - and you want to interview real profiles, not a resume dump from a marketplace.
Meet Our Engineers
Pre-vetted senior engineers available for interview this week.
AI Engineer
"Shipped a multi-tenant agentic platform with per-user OAuth credential isolation - the pattern most enterprise buyers ask us about."
How fast can an augmented engineer start?
Day 1
Discovery call
Stack, scale, and what you need this engineer to own.
48 hours
Shortlist
2-4 profiles matched to your stack, ready within three business days of the call.
Days 3-4
Your interviews
You run the interview, your rubric, your call.
Day 7
Productive in your codebase
Onboarded to your repo, tools and standups - shipping by day seven.
What nearshore staff augmentation costs
A senior nearshore engineer at Greelow costs between $5,000 and $9,000 per month, all-inclusive, depending on seniority. That single rate covers salary, benefits, equipment, payroll compliance and our management overhead - there are no recruitment fees, setup fees or per-hire minimums.
Senior engineer
$5,000–$6,500/mo
8+ years typical
Staff / Principal / AI Specialist
$6,500–$9,000/mo
10+ years or specialized
Fractional CTO + Squad
Custom quote
0.25–0.5 FTE + 2–5 engineers
Nearshore staff augmentation vs. project outsourcing vs. direct hiring
Greelow (staff augmentation) | Project outsourcing | Direct US hiring | |
|---|---|---|---|
Who controls priorities | You - the engineer works your backlog and reports to your managers | The vendor - scoped to a fixed specification | You |
Speed to start | 7 business days | Weeks of scoping before work starts | 8-14 weeks to hire |
Cost | $5,000-$9,000/mo all-inclusive per engineer | Fixed-price or milestone billing per project | $14,000-$22,000/mo loaded |
Who keeps the architecture knowledge | Your team - the engineer works inside your repo | Often leaves with the vendor when the project ends | Your team |
Exit | 30 days notice, either side | Contractual off-boarding per project terms | Standard US employment termination |
How Greelow Compares
Same seniority. Real differences in cost, communication, and overlap.
Senior Engineer Cost
English Level
Timezone Overlap (EST)
Time to Hire
Recruitment Fee
AI-Native Engineers
Talent Retention
Compliance & Payroll
Greelow
$48–84K/yr
Fluent (tested)
Full (1hr diff)
7 business days
$0
Standard
We manage
All included
US Hire
$180–220K/yr
Native
Full
2–3 months
$20–40K
Rare
You manage
You handle
India
$30–50K/yr
Basic–Mid
0–2 hrs
2–4 weeks
$2–5K
Rare
High churn
Complex
Eastern Europe
$50–80K/yr
Good
4–6 hrs
3–6 weeks
$5–10K
Some
Moderate
Complex
Other LATAM
$40–70K/yr
Mid–Good
0–3 hrs
2–4 weeks
$3–8K
Rare
Moderate
Varies
All-inclusive monthly rates from $5,000 to $9,000 per engineer, with senior specialists higher, depending on seniority and specialization. No hidden fees.
Teams we have embedded with
Chopra Foundation
Meditation & Wellbeing App
Built the Chopra mobile app end-to-end - meditation library, self-care tools, and expert-led content - with a multi-disciplinary squad over 18 months.
Romvo
Enterprise Collaboration Platform Revitalization
Rescued and rebuilt Romvo's enterprise social-network product with a distributed squad: performance, stability, and new business surfaces.
OneReach.ai
Enterprise Conversational AI Platform
Embedded a dedicated team inside a conversational-AI platform that shipped NLP pipelines, IVR systems, and LLM integrations end to end.
Common questions
- Nearshore staff augmentation is the practice of adding engineers from a nearby country to your existing team, where they report to your managers and follow your processes. It differs from project outsourcing, where a vendor takes ownership of a scope and delivers it independently.
- In staff augmentation you keep control of priorities, architecture and process, and the engineer works inside your team; in outsourcing the vendor owns the deliverable and works to a specification. Augmentation keeps the knowledge in your codebase and your team.
- Between $5,000 and $9,000 per engineer per month at Greelow, all-inclusive by seniority, with no recruitment or setup fees. That compares with roughly $14,000 to $22,000 per month loaded for an equivalent senior hire in the US.
- Seven business days from signature at Greelow, including access, onboarding and the first ticket. The shortlist is usually ready three business days after the discovery call.
- You interview them yourself before they join. Every profile we shortlist has real project history - we walk you through recent architecture decisions they made, not a resume of tools.
- One engineer for 30 days. Most of our engagements run 3+ years, but we don't lock you into that.
- Yes. After 6 months, we can convert to direct employment for a modest one-time fee. Before 6 months, we recommend the monthly engagement - it's better for both sides while trust builds.
- Every engagement includes handoff documentation as part of the last two weeks. Your team gets architecture notes, runbook, and open PR context - not a Slack goodbye.