Full Scale named to the Inc. 5000 for the 5th time
Founder has hired developers offshore since 2012

Hire offshore developers without the horror stories

Hire dedicated, senior offshore developers added straight to your team. This is staff augmentation in the Philippines, not a black-box project shop. We have placed pre-vetted offshore engineers across every modern stack for SaaS, fintech, and enterprise teams, and every one is full-time and ready to join your standups in as little as 7 days.

20+ yrs
Founder-led software engineering leadership
350+
Offshore engineers on staff
7 days
To your first hire
#eng-standup-overlap
AC
Antonio9:02 AM

Caught up on your PR comments overnight and pushed the fixes. Ready for another look when you're online.

IM
Ivy Marie9:03 AM

Client demo build is signed off and tagged. Dropped the release notes in the launch thread.

JW
Jennifer9:04 AM

Our overlap window is your morning today. Want to pair on the payments bug live before you sign off?

Hire in as little as 7 days
93%+ retention

Offshore engineering teams trusted by enterprises and scale-ups

Matt Watson, Full Scale CEO and four-time tech founder
Matt Watson
Founder & CEO, Full Scale
Previously founded VinSolutions (~$150M exit) and Stackify
A note from our founder

I built Full Scale to be the offshore vendor I'd actually trust with my own code

I've talked to founders over the years, and I've heard every offshore horror story there is. The developer who held a company's code hostage after he got fired. The "contractor" who turned out to be working from somewhere nobody expected. The freelancer who went silent the week of launch. I started Full Scale because almost none of those are distance problems. They're trust problems.

The cheapest freelancer you can find is how most of those stories start. Hiring globally is genuinely cheaper than the priciest US zip codes at the same quality, but cheapshoring , chasing the lowest possible rate from a vendor nobody can vouch for, is how you save a little now and lose a lot later. The real win is high-quality talent from a vendor you can hold accountable.

So that's what we built. When you hire through Full Scale, you sign your IP-assignment and confidentiality agreements with a US company, enforceable under US law, not with individuals abroad you'd have to chase across a border. Every engineer is our employee, vetted with character references, education verification, an NBI criminal check, and an in-person address verification before they ever touch your repo. In the entire history of the company, we have never had a single IP or confidentiality issue.

Today Full Scale is an offshore development company built around senior Filipino engineers and the Product Driven framework. Founders come to us after the Upwork circus, after the freelancer who ghosted, when they're ready to do it the right way. If that's where you are, let's talk.

4x
Tech founder
13+ yrs
Running offshore engineering teams
What sets the bench apart

AI-powered offshore engineers, trained on Product Driven principles

Most offshore engineering teams adopting AI are shipping more code without shipping better software. The slop volume climbs, production bugs follow, and engineers whose only skill is typing faster end up costing more in cleanup than they save in keystrokes.

Full Scale offshore developers are trained on something different: the Product Driven approach from Matt's book, combined with the full modern AI toolkit (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor). They think first, type second, and use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't add value. That combination is rare, and it is what distributed engineering teams should be hiring for in 2026.

Pillar 1

Product Driven engineering

Our engineers are trained on the five pillars from Matt's book: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Ownership, and Courage. The result is offshore developers who push back on bad product decisions, ask whether a ticket should exist before writing it, and own the outcome of what ships. They are not order takers.

Read Product Driven, the book
Pillar 2

AI as a thinking partner

Every offshore engineer on our bench works with GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor every day. They use AI to explore options, scaffold the boring parts, generate test suites, and review their own pull requests before a human ever sees them. Judgment stays with the engineer, the grunt work moves to the machine.

AI without product thinking is just a slop machine, and the offshore engineers I want on my team don't get caught by that. They reason about the system before they reach for Copilot, and they use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't matter. That's who we hire and train at Full Scale.

Matt Watson, Founder & CEO, Full Scale
Featured case study

The engineering team behind AMC Theatres

AMC Theatres
Fortune 500 client
Industry
Media & Entertainment
Engagement
Fully integrated team
Footprint
900+ theatres worldwide
Derrick Leggett, CIO of AMC Theatres: It's a fully integrated team. It's just some of the people happen to be living in the Philippines.
Pricing

Dedicated offshore developers, starting at $35 an hour

That rate covers a senior offshore engineer in the Philippines working full-time on your project, with payroll, benefits, HR, and equipment all handled by Full Scale. The same role hired locally in the US costs $150K to $185K a year, and that math is what drives most of our clients to call.

Starting at
$35/ hour
Per dedicated offshore developer, fully loaded
Compared to US based hires
Roughly 40-50% of an equivalent US hire

Final rate depends on seniority and skill specialty.

What you get for that rate
  • Full-time, dedicated offshore engineer
  • Pre-vetted by senior engineering reviewers
  • Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
  • Payroll, HR, equipment, benefits handled by us
  • US-based account manager you can escalate to
  • Two-week money-back guarantee if it isn't a fit
Trusted operator

Full Scale has made the Inc. 5000 five years in a row and is Great Place to Work certified. We have been doing this since 2018, and pricing isn't the only reason clients stay with our offshore development company, it's the easiest reason to call.

Why the Philippines

The reason offshore engineering works here

You can also hire dedicated developers in the Philippines across every stack we staff, with the same vetting bar, retention numbers, and engagement model.

English-fluent by default

The Philippines is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. Standups, code reviews, and customer calls work the way they do with any US team member.

Real time-zone overlap

Most of our offshore engineers shift their hours toward the US business day, giving 3-4 hours of real-time overlap with East and West Coast teams, so decisions happen live during shared hours rather than crawling through 24-hour async handoffs.

Deep engineering talent pool

The Philippines has a deep, growing pool of CS and IT talent, and post-pandemic remote hiring opened it up nationwide rather than one city. The local engineering workforce covers every modern stack we hire for: Node.js, React, .NET, Java, Python, mobile, and the full cloud and DevOps surface area.

Cultural alignment with US teams

Filipino engineers grow up on US business norms, US TV, and US tech culture, so agile rituals, direct feedback, and collaborative workflows feel familiar from day one. These teams integrate fast rather than needing constant management.

Where hiring offshore actually goes wrong

The risk in offshore isn't the distance, it's the lack of accountability

I've talked to founders and heard every horror story: the developer who held the code hostage after getting fired, the "contractor" who turned out to be working from somewhere nobody expected, the freelancer who vanished the week of launch. Almost none of those are distance problems. They're accountability problems, the kind a cheapshoring shortcut creates and a trusted US vendor removes. Here's where it breaks, and how we take each risk off the table.

Chasing the cheapest developer

The cheapest freelancer or low-end shop almost never works out, and you usually pay for it later in rework. I call that cheapshoring. Hiring globally is dramatically cheaper than the priciest US zip codes at the same quality, so the win is high-quality talent from a vendor you trust, not the lowest hourly rate you can find.

No real recourse when it goes wrong

When you hire a freelancer in another country and they ghost or keep a copy of your code, what's your recourse? You're enforcing an NDA in a jurisdiction you don't understand. With a US-based vendor, you sign with a US company and the agreements are enforceable under US law.

Strangers committing to your codebase

Most offshore shops vet for syntax and stop there. We run character references, education verification, an NBI criminal check (the Philippines equivalent of the FBI), and an in-person address verification before anyone joins a client team. You are not handing your repo to someone nobody verified.

IP and confidentiality you can't enforce

Your IP assignment and confidentiality terms should sit with one accountable US entity, not be scattered across individual contractors abroad. Every Full Scale engineer is our employee, under our agreements, which is how we've gone the entire history of the company without a single IP or confidentiality issue.

Writing good code but working badly across a border

Plenty of engineers pass a coding screen and still stall on a distributed team because they can't write a clear pull request, raise a risk in writing, or own an outcome without being chased. We hire for those habits, and we train them on the Product Driven framework, before we ever test for a stack.

Vendors with no leverage over their own people

A freelancer can ghost a client with no consequences. Our engineers answer to Full Scale as their employer, which gives us the leverage to hold them accountable in a way a marketplace never can. That accountability layer is the difference between a team you can rely on and one you're chasing.

Ways to hire offshore developers

Hire offshore developers for the work that matters most

Most offshore-developer hiring conversations skip past the actual engagement. What kind of team do you need? A single dedicated engineer, a full pod, staff augmentation for an existing team, a new product build, or a rescue of an engagement that's gone sideways? Full Scale runs all of these on the same Product Driven, AI-augmented bench of senior offshore engineers in the Philippines. Here are the most common shapes we get hired for.

Dedicated offshore developers

A single full-time offshore engineer assigned exclusively to your team. They join your standups, work your hours, commit to your repo, and stay on your project for years rather than months. This is the most common engagement we run and the right starting point if you want one person to ramp up and own a slice of your roadmap.

Read about dedicated developers

Dedicated offshore development teams

A pod of 2-10 offshore engineers staffed together, optionally with QA, DevOps, and a tech lead. The pod operates as one extended team inside your engineering org rather than a separate vendor relationship. The right shape when you are building a new product surface or scaling an existing one without spinning up an in-house team.

Offshore staff augmentation

Drop senior offshore engineers directly into your existing team to fill specific gaps: a missing backend dev, a frontend specialist for a redesign, an extra mobile engineer for a release. Same vetting and retention as dedicated hires, with the flexibility to scale the team up or down by a head with 30 days notice.

Read about staff augmentation

Cross-stack offshore engineering

Most offshore teams need more than one specialty. We staff from a single vetted bench across frontend, backend, full-stack, mobile, DevOps, QA, and data engineering, so you don't end up managing a patchwork of vendors. One contract, one account manager, every role you need.

New product offshore pods

When you are spinning up a new product or business unit and need a complete engineering team without the 6-12 month US hiring cycle, we can stand up a full offshore pod in weeks. A typical new-product pod includes 3-6 engineers, a tech lead, and optional product or design support, embedded in your tools and reporting into your org.

Offshore modernization and rescue

When an existing system needs to be modernized, migrated, or rescued from a failed engagement, we staff senior offshore engineers who have done it before. This is often where Full Scale ends up: clients call us after an offshore engagement collapsed, and we take over with engineers who can actually read the codebase and ship a recovery plan.

Hire offshore backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, and QA engineers

Eight offshore engineering specializations, one staffing partner

Most offshore teams need more than one role. Hire dedicated offshore backend engineers, senior frontend specialists, mobile developers, cloud engineers, and offshore QA from a single vetted bench. Mix and match seniorities as the project requires.

Offshore Backend Engineers

Senior backend developers across Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Go. They own API design, business logic, and data access layers, and they work fluently with Postgres, MySQL, Mongo, and Redis.

Mid to Staff

Offshore Frontend Engineers

React, Vue, Angular, and Next.js specialists who care about accessibility, design-system discipline, and performance. They ship components your design team actually signs off on and that don't break in week three.

Mid to Senior

Offshore Full-Stack Developers

End-to-end engineers who pair a backend stack with a frontend stack (Node + React, .NET + Angular, Rails + Vue) and ship features from the database to the UI without handoffs. The right choice for early-stage product teams.

Mid to Senior

Offshore Mobile Engineers

Native iOS (Swift), native Android (Kotlin/Java), and cross-platform (React Native, Flutter) developers who own the full mobile delivery from feature build through App Store and Play Store release.

Mid to Senior

Offshore Cloud Engineers

AWS, Azure, and GCP specialists who write production infrastructure as Terraform or Bicep, design container platforms on EKS/AKS/GKE, and design the data and auth layers your application actually runs on.

Senior

Offshore DevOps & Platform Engineers

Engineers who build the CI/CD pipelines, observability, and developer-experience tooling that make offshore teams ship fast. GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, OpenTelemetry, IaC, and on-call discipline included.

Mid to Senior

Offshore Security & SRE

Security and reliability engineers who run OWASP reviews, threat-model new features, set up SAST/DAST in CI, and own incident response. The hire to make when you cross the compliance threshold or after your first real outage.

Senior to Staff

Offshore QA & SDET

Test automation specialists who write integration tests, end-to-end suites, performance benchmarks, and the CI gates that catch regressions before they ship. They build the test pyramid your team has been meaning to invest in.

Mid to Senior
Offshore developers by industry

Offshore engineering expertise tuned to your industry

As an offshore development company that has been around for over a decade, we have placed dedicated offshore developers into nearly every industry that runs on software. Domain knowledge cuts onboarding time in half, so we match developers to projects where they have already shipped real code.

Finance & FinTech

Offshore engineering in finance means strict audit trails, regulatory reporting, and zero tolerance for data anomalies. We have built and scaled offshore teams on lending platforms, mortgage tools, and payment systems for regulated US companies. The compliance bar is high and our developers operate inside it.

LendingPaymentsComplianceReporting
Hire offshore developers across every modern stack

From greenfield SaaS builds to legacy system modernization

Whether you want to hire offshore React developers for a frontend rebuild, offshore Node.js engineers for a new API, or offshore mobile developers for an iOS and Android release, the bench covers every layer of the stack. Pick what you need. We will match an offshore engineer fluent in it.

Backend Languages
Node.jsPython.NET / C#JavaRubyPHPGo
Frontend & Web
ReactNext.jsVueAngularTypeScriptTailwind CSS
Mobile
Swift (iOS)Kotlin (Android)React NativeFlutter
Data & Storage
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBRedisDynamoDBSnowflake
Cloud & Infra
AWSAzureGCPKubernetesTerraformDocker
DevOps & AI Tooling
GitHub ActionsGitLab CIJenkinsOpenTelemetryGitHub CopilotClaudeCursor
How to hire dedicated offshore developers

Hire dedicated offshore developers, two ways

Most clients start with a single dedicated offshore developer and grow into a full team. Either way, you get full-time engineers who sit on your standups, work your hours, and ship code against your roadmap. Both options are our staff augmentation model at the core: dedicated, long-term engineers embedded in your team rather than freelancers, shared resources, or a project shop on the side. When the workload is a high-concurrency service or a gRPC platform, you can hire offshore Golang developers under the same model.

Dedicated developer

Full-time, exclusive, sits on your standups.

Best for
Long-running products with a real roadmap.
What's included
  • Full-time offshore engineer assigned only to your project
  • Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
  • Joins your standups, reports to your tech lead
  • We handle payroll, HR, equipment, retention
  • Two-week money-back guarantee

Dedicated team

Multiple engineers, embedded as a pod.

Best for
New product builds, full-stack feature pods.
What's included
  • 2-10 offshore engineers staffed together as one pod
  • Optional QA, DevOps, and tech lead included
  • Operates as a team inside your engineering org
  • Scale up or down by a head with 30 days notice
  • Account manager you can escalate to in the US
From first call to first commit in as little as 7 days

How to hire a dedicated offshore developer from Full Scale

We skip the 3-6 week recruitment cycle and the cold sourcing entirely. Our bench of offshore development talent in the Philippines is already built and run through our vetting process, and every step below has a named owner on our side.

01

Discovery call

Day 1

30 minutes with our team. We learn your stack, your roadmap, the seniority level you need, and how your team currently operates. We don't pitch on the call, we walk through what you actually need from a hire.

02

Engineer match

Days 2-3

We pull 1-3 pre-vetted offshore engineers from the bench whose skills, seniority, and prior project experience line up with what you described. You see their full profile and their actual project history.

03

Technical interview

Days 3-5

You interview the candidates the way you would interview any senior hire: live coding, system design, framework-specific gotchas, and architectural reviews. Pass anyone you don't believe in.

04

Contract & onboarding

Days 5-6

Sign once. We handle every contract, payroll, equipment, and HR detail in the Philippines so you don't have an offshore entity to manage. You just get a developer.

05

First commit

Day 7

Your developer joins your standups, gets repo access, and ships code in their first week. Our delivery managers stay involved to make sure ramp-up doesn't stall.

How we compare

Full Scale vs the other ways to hire an offshore developer

Every hiring path has trade-offs. Here is how a dedicated offshore engineer from our offshore development company compares against the alternatives most teams consider first when they want to hire offshore developers.

FeatureFull ScaleFreelancer / UpworkTraditional offshore agencyUS recruiter / FTE hire
Pre-vetted senior offshore developer bench
Time to first hire7 days1-3 days3-6 weeks6-12 weeks
Dedicated full-time, not shared
Founder-led engineering oversight
Sits on your standups, your tools
Long-term retention93%+lowvariesvaries
Two-week money-back guarantee
Handles payroll, HR, equipment
US-based account management
n/a
Typical fully-loaded cost vs US~40-50%varies~50-65%100%
Honest tradeoffs

When hiring offshore developers is the wrong call

Most pages like this would tell you offshore engineering is always the right move. It is not. Below are the cases where we have either passed on a project ourselves or told the client they should not hire dedicated offshore engineers from anyone, us included. If any of these match what you are doing, we will say so on the discovery call rather than sign you up and hope it works out.

You don't have a real roadmap yet

Very early stage exploration where the spec changes weekly is the wrong fit for a dedicated engineer. What you need is a co-founder or a freelancer who can absorb the thrash. A long-term hire needs accumulated context to be productive, and that context is exactly what you do not have yet.

Your work is genuinely on-soil regulated

Certain DoD contracts, ITAR-covered systems, and a narrow slice of regulated workloads require US persons on US soil. If that is you, we will tell you on the call, not after the contract.

The scope is fixed and short

Think a one-time integration, a four-week refactor, or a single migration that ends on a known date. Hire a freelancer or a specialist consultancy for those. Dedicated developers earn their value over months and years, and a short fixed-scope job rarely runs long enough to pay back the ramp-up.

You can't actually fill a developer's time

If you only have 10 hours of well-defined work a week, a dedicated full-time engineer will end up idle or pulled into work you didn't budget for. That ends badly for both sides. Part-time engagements and fractional hires exist for this reason, and we are not them.

The bench

Real offshore engineers, named and vetted

A sample of the offshore engineers on our team. These are real Full Scale developers working remotely from across the Philippines, and you'll meet candidates like them during your interview round.

Ray A., Senior Software Developer at Full Scale
Ray A.
Senior Software Developer
Cebu, Philippines 10 years

A senior software developer with 10 years of experience across ASP.NET, C#, and .NET.

ASP.NETC#.NET.NET CorePHPJavaJavaScriptPython
Nestor D., Software Developer at Full Scale
Nestor D.
Software Developer
Cebu, Philippines 3 years

A software developer building with React, Vue.js, and JavaScript.

ReactVue.jsJavaScriptASP.NETPythonC#Django
Lovely B., Software Developer at Full Scale
Lovely B.
Software Developer
Cebu, Philippines 5 years

A software developer who ships production work with React, CSS, and JavaScript.

ReactCSSJavaScriptJavaNode.jsMySQLSpring Boot
David M., Senior Software Developer at Full Scale
David M.
Senior Software Developer
Cebu, Philippines 12 years

A senior software developer with 12 years of experience across Android, Android Java, and iOS.

AndroidAndroid JavaiOSKotlinReact NativeSwiftIonicSwiftUI
Clarice L., Software Developer at Full Scale
Clarice L.
Software Developer
Bohol, Philippines 5 years

A software developer who ships production work with JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#.

JavaScriptTypeScriptC#C++SpringAPI Development
Kirk H., Software Developer at Full Scale
Kirk H.
Software Developer
Aklan, Philippines 8 years

A software developer who ships production work with React, Bootstrap, and JavaScript.

ReactBootstrapJavaScriptTypeScriptAndroidAndroid JavaC#Cucumber
Why top US engineering teams pick Full Scale

The numbers behind an offshore staffing partner that works

350+
Engineers on staff
across the Philippines
93%+
Annual retention
your team stays your team
7 days
To first commit
from discovery call to shipping
200+
Tech companies served
since 2018
13+ yrs
Running offshore teams
founder-led, distributed since 2012
<3%
Applicant acceptance rate
we hire the top of every batch
What clients say

From the people we staff offshore teams for

With Full Scale's developers, we transformed the commercial real estate landscape. Their team's proficiency in agile development and proactive communication accelerated our product release.

Jeff Weiner
Realquantum
Read the Realquantum case study

The team at Full Scale brought our vision to life with their development skills. They helped us navigate technical requirements with ease, resulting in a robust platform our users trust.

Nomi Smith
PMI Rate Pro
Read the PMI Rate Pro case study
Frequently asked

Everything you wanted to know about hiring offshore developers

Hire dedicated offshore developers this week

Add senior offshore engineers without taking on the offshore risk

In 30 minutes we'll cover what you're building, the seniority and stack you need, and how the US-vendor model handles IP, confidentiality, and vetting so you're not carrying that risk. You'll meet pre-vetted candidates from our Philippines bench within a week. It's a working conversation about your roadmap, not a sales pitch.

First commit in as little as 7 days
Two-week money-back guarantee
Full-time dedicated