IT staff augmentation and dedicated developers.

Staff augmentation is a different engagement from a project, and the teams disappointed by it are almost always the ones sold one while expecting the other. We place engineers into your team. You keep the roadmap, the standards and the decisions — which is the point, and also the responsibility that comes with it.

Augmentation, outsourcing or a project?

Three ways to buy engineering, and where each fits

Model	Right when	Who owns delivery
Staff augmentation	You have a roadmap and a team, and not enough hands or a missing specialism	You do
Managed project	You have an outcome in mind and would rather buy the outcome than manage the work	We do
Fully outsourced function	The capability is not core and you do not intend to build it in-house	We do, long term

If you do not have someone able to direct the work day to day, augmentation is the wrong purchase and we will say so. A scoped project is usually the better answer in that case, and it is a shorter conversation than discovering it in month two.

Who we place

Engineers already delivering on our own client work. Ecommerce specialists across Shopify, Liquid, Hydrogen and headless storefronts; backend engineers in Laravel, Node.js and PostgreSQL, including integration work; mobile engineers in Flutter and React Native with release management experience; and QA engineers who build test automation your team keeps afterwards.

Every engineer we place has shipped production ecommerce. We do not maintain a bench of unallocated juniors to fill a seat quickly, which means we are sometimes slower to start than a body shop — and it is the whole difference in what arrives.

You interview before anyone joins. If you do not want the person, you do not get the person, and that is not a negotiation.

How we vet the people we place

Worth being specific, because "vetted" is a word every supplier uses and almost nobody defines.

Engineers join Coder71 through the same hiring process as our project teams: a technical interview against real problems rather than puzzles, a review of production code they have actually shipped, and reference checks with the people who managed them. They then work on our own client projects before being offered for placement, which means somebody here has watched them deliver under a deadline rather than only interviewed them.

We check the things that decide whether an embedded engineer works out, which are frequently not the technical ones: whether they write down what they did, whether they raise a problem early or hope it resolves, whether they can disagree with a decision and then implement it properly anyway, and whether they can be understood in writing by people who are asleep when they are working.

Then you interview them, and your assessment overrides ours. That order matters — we are filtering, not deciding.

How it runs

Your repository, your board, your review process, your definition of done. Your standups, your sprint ceremonies, your Slack. The engineer is a member of your team who happens to be employed by us; they are not running a parallel project you then have to reconcile.

A working-hours overlap is agreed before anyone starts — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia or the Middle East. Real overlap, in hours, written down, not "we are flexible". Onboarding targets a first shipped change inside the first sprint, and if that is going to slip we tell you in the first week rather than the sixth.

What we do that a marketplace does not

The engineer has colleagues. When they hit a Shopify Functions problem at four in the afternoon, there is a team behind them who have solved it before, and that support costs you nothing extra — it is the main practical argument for an agency over an independent contractor.

They also have a manager who is not you. Performance, leave cover, equipment, payroll, contracts and compliance are our problem. If someone is not working out, replacing them is our obligation rather than a renegotiation, and continuity of context during a handover is on us.

Knowledge stays with you

The failure mode of augmentation is that the contractor leaves and takes the understanding with them. So decisions are written down in your repository, not in a private notebook; pairing and review with your permanent staff is expected rather than optional; and anything that only one person knows how to do is treated as a risk to close.

The measure we would want you to apply: if every engineer we placed left tomorrow, could your team keep shipping? If the answer is no, we have not done this properly.

Who this is for

In-house teams with a roadmap longer than their capacity. Companies that need a specialism — Shopify Plus, headless, Flutter — for a period rather than permanently. Teams covering parental leave or a departure without rushing a permanent hire. Agencies who need white-label build capacity delivered under their own brand. Startups who need senior engineering before they can justify senior salaries.

Commercials

Monthly rolling, with one month's notice on both sides. Rates depend on seniority, specialism and the length of the engagement, and we quote them per role once we know what you actually need — a Shopify specialist for three months and a backend engineer for a year are not the same arrangement.

Tell us the gap in the team and the overlap you need. We will tell you honestly whether we have the right person and when they would be available. Talk to our team.