Who legally employs an engineer you hire in another country?
Settle this question first, before you compare rates, timelines, or candidates.
The short answer
Someone has to be the engineer’s legal employer.
The legal employer holds the employment contract, runs payroll, pays social contributions, and answers to the labor authority of the country where the engineer lives. There are three ways to set this up, and each one fits a different situation.
Set up your own entity
You register a company in the engineer’s country and hire directly. You get full control and take on every obligation, including the legal and accounting setup you have to maintain. It makes sense when you plan to hire many people in one country for several years.
Employer of record
A third party employs the person you already chose, on your behalf. It handles the contract, payroll, and compliance. It makes sense when you found the person yourself and need someone to employ them legally.
Staffing with employment included
The partner finds the person and also employs them. It makes sense when finding the profile is the hard part, which is usually the case in AI, security, and data.
This is the model we offer. An employer of record steps in once you’ve found the person. We start earlier, when you still can’t find them.
What a PEO is, and why it’s probably not what you’re looking for
A PEO is co-employment: your company already has employees, and the PEO takes over HR, payroll, and benefits alongside you. It’s a useful model for a company that already has its people.
If your problem is finding the engineer, a PEO comes in one step too late: it helps once the person is already hired.
What we take on, and what stays with you
Transfers to us
The employment contract · payroll and social contributions · statutory benefits and leave · compliance with local labor law · the administrative side of hiring, changing and ending the relationship.
Stays with you
Direction of the technical work · who does what and when · access to your systems and data, and the governance of that access · the decision about who joins your team.
No partner can take on all of the risk. What we can do is be clear about where our responsibility ends and yours begins.
What risk stays with you
Most partners list what they take off your plate. Here is the other list: the risks that stay with you, whoever employs the engineer.
What moves to us
The employment side, as listed above. That includes keeping up with labor law changes in a country where you don’t operate, which is most of the administrative work.
Four responsibilities that remain yours
Direction of the technical work
The engineer joins your team, so your team directs them with its own practices, review standards, and judgment about what gets built. A partner that takes over that direction is offering a project service, which is a different product.
Access to your systems and data
This is the area that has changed the most. AI, security, and data roles need access to your most important systems to do their job. Someone in your organization has to decide what that access includes, what it excludes, and who reviews it when the work changes. That decision stays inside your company.
Who joins your team
Your team interviews the candidates and makes the final decision.
The consequences of the work
If something your team built fails, your customers feel it, and your company is the one that answers to them, whatever the contract says.
Continuity
People leave, and that includes your own employees.
Replacing a person restores the headcount, but their knowledge leaves with them: the decisions nobody wrote down, the reason a service is built the way it is, the part of the system that fails quietly. A replacement clause can’t bring that knowledge back.
What reduces that cost is how much of the work is recorded in your systems, through documentation, tests, and decision records, instead of living in one person’s head. That holds true whoever employs the engineer.
So, beyond asking a partner whether they guarantee a replacement, ask this: what do you do to make the handover easier?
Why we put this in writing
So the limits are part of the plan from day one.
If these limits come up for the first time in month seven, the conversation turns to blame. A partner that is clear about its limits from the start is easier to work with than one that promises to cover everything.
Tell us which position you can’t fill
Looking for a specific technology or role?
Send us the stack and the seniority you need. We’ll confirm whether we can find that profile.
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