Working with us
Twelve questions to ask an offshore development team
What we'd ask if we were the one hiring: time zones, ownership, security, quality and how to start without much risk.
28 October 2026 · 2 min read
Hiring a development team in another country can get you experienced engineers at a sensible cost. It can also go badly, with missed deadlines, nobody sure who owns what, and code no one else can maintain.
In our experience the country is rarely the problem. How the team works is. These are the questions we'd ask if we were on your side of the table.
Time zones and communication
- How many hours of your working day overlap with ours? You want to be able to ask a question in the morning and get an answer before lunch.
- Who will we talk to every day? A named lead who understands both the business problem and the code is worth more than an account manager who relays messages.
- How will we see progress? Look for a working demo every sprint, a board you can see, and code in your own repository from the start.
Ownership and security
- Who owns the IP? The contract should assign all of it to you, with no conditions attached.
- Where will the code and data live? In your GitHub, your cloud account and your design tool, with access you control.
- Will you sign an NDA before we get into detail? A decent team will offer before you ask.
- How do you handle security? Ask about access control, how passwords and keys are stored, dependency scanning, and whether they could help you answer a customer's security questionnaire.
Quality
- Who actually does the work? Find out whether senior engineers lead the project and review the code, and ask to meet them before signing.
- How do you test? Automated tests, code review and a staging environment should be normal, and you shouldn't have to pay extra for them.
- Can we see similar work? A good case study explains the problem, the approach and what changed. A wall of logos doesn't tell you much.
Starting small
- Can we start with something small? A pilot or a short discovery sprint lets you judge the working relationship before committing to a long contract.
- What happens after launch? Ask about maintenance, response times and how improvements get prioritised.
Comparing teams
Score each team from 1 to 5 on every question. We'd weight communication, ownership and quality the most, because those are the hardest to fix once a project is underway.
We built Centr8 around our own answers to these questions. If you'd like to put us through them, get in touch.