Who legally employs an engineer you hire in another country?
It’s the first question worth settling — before comparing rates, timelines or candidates.
The short answer
Someone has to be their legal employer. Not «manage» them, not «coordinate» them — hold the employment contract, run payroll, pay social contributions and answer to the labour authority of the country where that person lives.
There are three ways that happens, and they are not interchangeable.
Set up your own entity
You register a company in their country and hire directly. Full control, full obligation — and a legal and accounting footprint you now have to maintain. Makes sense when you’re hiring many people in one country, for years.
Employer of record
A third party employs the person on your behalf. You already chose who. They handle contract, payroll and compliance. 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 employs them. Makes sense when the profile is the hard part — which, for AI, security and data, it usually is.
This is what we do. And the difference matters: an employer of record starts from «we already found them.» We start from «we 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 real and useful model — for a company that already has the people.
If you’re reading this because you can’t find the engineer, a PEO doesn’t solve your problem. It solves the one after it.
What transfers to us, and what doesn’t
Transfers to us
The employment contract · payroll and social contributions · statutory benefits and leave · compliance with local labour 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 · and the decision about who joins your team.
Nobody can transfer you the whole risk, and any partner who says otherwise is worth a second look. What we can do is be precise about where the line falls.
What risk stays with you
Every partner will tell you what they take off your plate. That list is usually accurate and usually incomplete. This is the other one.
What genuinely transfers to us
Worth stating plainly, because it’s real and it’s most of the administrative burden:
The employment contract · payroll and social contributions · statutory benefits and leave · compliance with the labour law of a country you don’t operate in, including the parts that change without anyone telling you · the administration of hiring, changing terms, and ending the relationship.
What doesn’t, whatever anyone promises
Direction of the technical work
The engineer joins your team, so your team directs them — your practices, your review standards, your judgment about what gets built. We can’t take that, and a partner who offers to is describing a different product.
Access to your systems and data
This is the one that changed most. AI, security and data roles need reach into the systems that matter — that’s the job, not a concession. Someone in your organization owns the decision about what that reach includes, what it excludes, and who reviews it when the work changes shape in month four. That someone is not your staffing partner.
The decision about who joins your team.
You interview. You say yes.
The consequences of the work
If what your team built fails, it fails for your customers. No commercial arrangement changes who explains it to them.
The one nobody advertises: continuity
People leave. Your own employees do too.
Replacing a person restores the headcount. It doesn’t restore what they knew — the decisions nobody wrote down, the reason a service is structured the way it is, which part of the system breaks quietly. That context walks out the door, and a replacement clause doesn’t bring it back.
What actually reduces the cost isn’t a guarantee. It’s how much of the work lives in your systems — documentation, tests, decision records — rather than in one person’s head. That’s true regardless of who employs them.
So the question worth asking a partner isn’t do you guarantee a replacement. It’s what do you do to make the handover less painful?
Why we put this in writing
Because the alternative is that you find out in month seven, and by then the conversation is about blame instead of planning.
A partner who is specific about what they don’t cover is easier to work with than one who is vague about covering everything. The second is more comfortable to sign and more expensive to be wrong about.
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