In this guide 6 sections
You direct the work and set priorities, write tickets and review pull requests, while the vendor employs the engineers and handles payroll, leave cover and equipment. Standups are shared. A managed team with its own lead moves daily direction to the vendor, who then answers for delivery against the plan.
What stays with you
Augmented engineers work inside your process. They take tickets from your board, follow your branching rules and ship through your pipeline, so every product decision, from scope to release date, stays with you.
Someone on your side must own the backlog, and a product owner or engineering manager should write the acceptance criteria and answer questions within a day. Engineers without an owner wait or guess. Both cost more than the invoice.
Code review also stays with you. Your senior engineers approve merges, enforce the style guide, check test coverage on every pull request and decide what reaches production before any release.
- Backlog order and sprint goals
- Ticket detail and acceptance criteria
- Pull request review and merge approval
- Architecture choices and tooling
- Access to repositories, environments and test data
What the vendor carries
Legally, the vendor is the employer. It signs the employment contract, runs payroll, pays statutory contributions and files the paperwork, and you rarely see any of it, which is how it should be.
Absence is covered too. When an engineer is ill or takes leave, the vendor either supplies a stand-in or agrees a reduced invoice, and the agreement should name which one applies.
Replacement is the third duty. When an engineer underperforms or resigns, the vendor runs the search for a successor, including interviews and the notice period of the person leaving. You carry none of that effort.
- Hiring, contracts, payroll and benefits
- Laptops, headsets and licences for their own tools
- Leave planning and sickness cover
- Performance conversations about employment terms
- Finding a replacement at short notice
Routines you share
Some things belong to neither side alone. Standups, sprint planning, retrospectives and demos work best when augmented engineers sit in the same calls as your staff, so treat them as team members, not outsiders.
Agree the overlap hours early. A team in another time zone may share only four hours with yours, so plan pairing sessions, pull request reviews and urgent questions inside that window.
Shared channels count too. Put engineers in your chat workspace and ticket board rather than relaying messages through an account manager, because every relay slows each answer and blurs who said what.
Where a managed team shifts the balance
A managed team arrives with a lead. The lead plans the sprint, assigns tasks, reviews code inside the team and reports progress to you, while you still own the goals and the final acceptance.
This suits owners with no spare engineering manager, because you trade some direct control for less supervision, and the vendor answers for delivery, not just for supplying people.
Ask who attends your sprint reviews, who owns the estimates and who answers when a release slips, because those three answers show exactly where the line falls.
- Technical lead and code review inside the vendor team
- Business analyst turning requests into tickets
- Vendor owned estimates and sprint plan
- Regular status report to you
Write the split down before day one
Put the split into a one-page chart that lists each duty and marks it yours, theirs or shared, since disputes nearly always sit on a duty nobody listed.
Review the chart after a month, because duties drift as engineers settle in, then send the copy to the product owner, the vendor’s account lead and every engineer. Drift is normal. Update it.
Responsibility split chart
A single-page table gives one row per duty and three columns marked client, vendor and shared, with rows covering backlog order, ticket writing, code review and release approval. More rows cover payroll, equipment, leave cover, replacement, standups and escalation, and a final column names the person responsible on each side.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Who is the engineer’s line manager in staff augmentation?
For daily work, you are. For employment matters such as contract, pay and leave, the vendor is, so name one contact on each side to avoid confusion.
Who reviews the code written by augmented engineers?
Your senior engineers should review it as they would an employee’s work, and with a managed team the vendor lead reviews, then your team approves the final merge.
Who pays for laptops and licences?
Usually the vendor supplies laptops. You provide access to your own tools, repositories and paid seats, and you should confirm the split in the agreement so nobody pays twice for the same licence.
What if an augmented engineer leaves mid project?
The vendor supplies a replacement. You should ask for an overlap period and written handover notes, because the new engineer needs context on the codebase, the open pull requests and the release calendar.