Hire a dedicated development team that runs like part of your own engineering org

A dedicated team from GarudLabs comes with a technical lead, sprint ownership, and a velocity number you can audit every two weeks. Our engineers work from Kathmandu, Nepal, with a fixed daily overlap against your working hours — so you are talking to the person writing the code, in the same day, not filing tickets into a queue.

What you are actually buying

Most pages targeting this term lead with an hourly rate. We think that is the least useful thing to compare, because a rate tells you nothing about whether the work will land. What determines the outcome of a dedicated team engagement is narrower and duller than pricing: who reviews the code, how quickly a blocker reaches a human who can clear it, and whether you can see velocity honestly enough to replan around it.

Those three things are what the rest of this page describes — the weekly rhythm, how we select engineers, and where a dedicated team is genuinely the wrong choice.

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What a dedicated team engagement looks like week to week

The cadence below is the actual operating rhythm, not an aspiration. It exists because distributed teams fail on communication long before they fail on technical skill.

  1. 1
    Every morning

    Written standup before your day starts

    Each engineer posts a written standup in your Slack — what shipped, what is in review, what is blocked. Because our working day starts ahead of Europe and well ahead of North America, this is waiting for you when you log on rather than arriving mid-afternoon.

  2. 2
    Daily

    Live overlap window

    We hold a fixed overlap window against your working hours for pairing, code review and unblock calls. You talk to the engineer writing the code, not to a relay layer. We commit to at least 4 hours of overlap for European clients and 3 or more for US East Coast.

  3. 3
    Weekly

    Demo of working software

    A recorded walkthrough of what actually runs in staging, not a status deck. Recording it means stakeholders in other timezones can watch without another meeting, and you get an honest artifact trail of progress.

  4. 4
    Every sprint

    Planning, and a velocity number you can audit

    We plan the next sprint against your priorities and publish completed versus committed scope. When velocity drops, you see it in the same week with the reason attached — not a quarter later in a retro.

  5. 5
    Monthly

    Engineering health review

    Test coverage, build times, incident count, dependency drift and accumulating technical debt, reviewed with you. This is where we flag work that has no visible feature output but protects your delivery speed.

Working across timezones from Kathmandu

We are a Nepal-based engineering studio. Nepal Time is UTC+5:45, and being straight about that is more useful to you than implying a presence we do not have. Here is how the day actually lines up:

Your regionTypical live overlapHow we handle it
UK & Europe4–6 hoursFull afternoon overlap. Standard working day on both sides, no shifting needed.
UAE, India, Singapore6–8 hoursEffectively a shared working day; synchronous by default.
Australia4–5 hoursOur afternoon meets your morning; demos scheduled in your AM.
US East Coast3–4 hoursOur evening covers your morning. Written standup lands before you start.
US West Coast2–3 hoursPart of the team shifts later to protect a live window. We will say plainly if your workflow needs more overlap than we can hold.

Outside the live window the work is asynchronous by design: decisions are written down in the repository, demos are recorded, and the project board is the single source of truth. That discipline is what makes the non-overlapping hours productive rather than merely quiet.

How the team is composed

A dedicated team is cross-functional on purpose. A group of five backend engineers cannot ship a product; it can only ship an API. Typical composition for a product team:

Technical lead

Owns architecture and sprint planning, and is accountable to you for delivery. Always included — this is the role that removes management load from your side.

Backend / platform engineers

APIs, data modelling, integrations, background jobs. Usually the largest share of the team on B2B products.

Frontend engineers

Application UI, state management, accessibility and performance work against real devices.

Mobile engineers

Added when the roadmap includes iOS or Android. Our production mobile work is Flutter.

QA engineer

Automated regression coverage plus release verification. Added from roughly four engineers upward, when manual checking stops scaling.

DevOps / cloud engineer

CI/CD, environments, monitoring and cost control. Often fractional rather than full-time unless infrastructure is the product.

We will recommend the smallest team that can hold your roadmap. Over-staffing a young product creates coordination overhead that shows up as slower delivery, not faster.

Core Technology Stack

ReactNode.jsPythonAWSLinearSlackFigma

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How engineers are selected and vetted

  1. 1
    Step 1

    Scoped against your actual stack

    We start from your repository, not a generic résumé pool. If your platform is Next.js on PostgreSQL, we shortlist engineers who have shipped and maintained that combination in production rather than people who have merely read about it.

  2. 2
    Step 2

    Technical review by a founding engineer

    Every candidate is reviewed by one of our four co-founders in their own discipline — backend and database work by Anupam, frontend by Nischal, full-stack and mobile by Nimesh, cloud and DevOps by Rohan. The person judging the code has shipped that kind of code.

  3. 3
    Step 3

    A real change, in a real codebase

    Instead of algorithm puzzles, candidates make a substantive change in a working codebase and defend their decisions in review. This surfaces how someone handles ambiguity, existing conventions and test coverage — the parts of the job that actually consume the week.

  4. 4
    Step 4

    You interview before anyone is assigned

    You meet the engineers and can decline any of them. Nobody lands on your team by allocation spreadsheet. If a match is wrong after onboarding, we replace at our cost, not yours.

Dedicated team or project-based engagement?

These models genuinely suit different situations, and picking the wrong one is expensive. A fixed-scope project is often the better commercial choice — if your requirements really are stable.

DimensionDedicated teamProject-based
Best whenThe roadmap will change as you learn from usersRequirements are known and unlikely to move
Scope changesReprioritise freely each sprint at no extra feeHandled as change requests, usually re-quoted
Cost shapePredictable recurring monthly cost; total depends on durationFixed total agreed upfront; easier to budget once
Who sets prioritiesYou, continuouslyAgreed once in the statement of work
Context retentionCompounds — same engineers stay with the codebaseEnds at handover unless you retain support
Weakness to knowNeeds your product input; an idle team still billsChange is slow and costly; discourages learning mid-build

Put simply: if you can write a specification you are confident will still be correct in four months, a project engagement will serve you better and we will propose that instead. If you expect to learn things that change the plan, a dedicated team absorbs that without renegotiation. If you only need one specialist skill and already have engineering management in place, staff augmentation is the cheaper structure — in coordination cost, not just in invoice.

Scaling up and down

Adding capacity

Two to four weeks from request to a productive engineer. That window is onboarding: environment access, codebase walkthrough, and a first shipped change under review. We do not claim same-week ramp-up, because an unprepared engineer slows a sprint down before speeding it up.

Reducing capacity

30 days' written notice per engineer on a monthly engagement. Before anyone rolls off, their in-flight work is closed or documented and handed over in a live session. We would rather you scale down cleanly and come back than feel trapped by a contract.

Products our team has shipped

These are live products built by this team. Each one is verifiable — you can download or visit it.

Entrance Dose

A live-class platform for medical entrance preparation, published on both the App Store and Google Play. Live video with adaptive bitrate streaming, course management, payments and progress tracking.

Flutter · PHP · MySQL · Firebase · Socket.io

See the work →

Gymtaar

A fitness platform pairing users with trainers: scheduling, in-app video consultation, supplement commerce and workout tracking. An ongoing engagement.

Flutter · PHP · MySQL · FonePay · Agora

See the work →

Above The Tide Motel

A booking front end with an integrated property management system for reservation handling.

Web · PMS integration

See the work →

Frequently Asked Questions

A dedicated development team is a group of engineers who work continuously on your product under your priorities, rather than on a fixed, pre-scoped project. You set the roadmap and we own delivery of it sprint by sprint. The distinction that matters in practice is continuity: the same engineers stay with your codebase month over month, so context accumulates instead of being rebuilt at every handover.

Our engineers work from Kathmandu, Nepal. We do not maintain offices elsewhere and we will not claim a local presence we do not have. Nepal Time is UTC+5:45, which gives us a solid working overlap with Europe, the UK, the UAE, India, Singapore and Australia, and a shorter but workable morning overlap with the US East Coast. For US West Coast clients we shift part of the team's day later to protect a live window.

Staff augmentation places individual engineers into your existing team, and your engineering manager directs their work. A dedicated team arrives with its own technical lead and takes ownership of sprint planning and delivery. Choose augmentation when you have management capacity and a specific skills gap. Choose a dedicated team when you need delivery capacity without adding management load. We offer both — see our staff augmentation service if the first description fits better.

Yes. Adding an engineer takes about two to four weeks, because we would rather onboard someone properly than drop an unprepared person into your sprint. Scaling down requires 30 days' written notice on a monthly engagement. We do not use long lock-in contracts to hold a team in place, and we will tell you when we think you are over-staffed for the roadmap in front of you.

You do, in full. IP assignment is written into the engagement agreement before any work starts, and code lives in your repositories under your organisation from day one. We do not hold code hostage in our own accounts, and we do not reuse your proprietary work elsewhere.

Dedicated teams are billed as a predictable recurring monthly cost per engineer, agreed before the engagement begins and held for the contracted period. There are no per-ticket charges and no change-request fees for reprioritising within your roadmap — reprioritisation is the point of the model. We scope the team composition with you first, then quote it, so the number reflects the actual roles rather than an averaged rate card.

We give you notice as soon as we know, and we overlap the outgoing and incoming engineer so context transfers through pairing rather than through a handover document. Because we insist on written architectural decisions and test coverage from the start, your project does not depend on any single person's memory. Replacement is at our cost.

Related services

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