Top 10 benefits of offshore teams for building software

Finding tech talent with specialised skills is tough, especially for organisations relying on unreliable or traditional hiring methods to build their teams. All they get are average developers, mediocre software, lower-quality output, and less reliable product development.

That’s why today, more and more business leaders are turning to offshoring, a model that allows them to build and expand development teams with elite engineers in countries like India.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the top 10 benefits of offshore teams, backed by real examples from companies that have successfully set up and scaled teams in the past years. We’ll also share best practices for making offshore teams work, and why India, particularly Bangalore, has become the go-to destination for Western companies building top teams.

What does building an offshore team actually mean?

Building an offshore team means hiring dedicated developers in another country, often thousands of miles away from your headquarters.

These professionals work exclusively for your business, are hired by you (after your offshore partner runs the recruitment process), and integrate fully into your company culture. They use your tools, follow your processes, and report directly to you.

You shouldn’t confuse building and offshore team with hiring via outsourcing, nearshoring, or onshoring:

The key difference between these models is that with offshoring, you get full control and ownership over your team’s work. Plus, offshore engineers care about your product because they’re invested in it long-term and don’t juggle clients.

The top 10 benefits of offshore teams

Based on our experience, these are the benefits of offshore teams that matter most to CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and tech leaders who’ve made the move.

Access to elite, specialised tech talent

Businesses in the US, Europe, and Australia can’t find the developers they need. And when they do find them, the prices are crazy high. Even in major tech hubs like London, San Francisco, or New York, finding professionals with in-demand or niche skills is becoming harder and more expensive every year.

Now compare that to India, one of the most popular offshoring destinations. The country has around 5.8 million developers working across major tech hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune.

These engineers specialise in the programming languages and technologies companies seek the most: Python, Java, JavaScript, .NET, C#, C++, Go, and Rust. Many have deep expertise in AI/ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and quantitative finance for building trading algorithms and risk models.

What does this mean for you? If you need to hire offshore developers who understand blockchain infrastructure, or Quant engineers experienced in building CVA sensitivity models, you can find them in India or any other offshore location more easily than at home.

Cost-effectiveness without sacrificing quality

Let’s talk numbers.

According to Levels.fyi, a tech salary portal, the average monthly salary for a software engineer in the US is $15,667. In the UK, it’s around $9,265. Meanwhile, in offshore locations like Colombia and India, hiring an equivalent engineer costs $2,696 and $2,668, respectively.

But it’s not just the salary that counts. When you hire locally, you also pay:

In Western countries, the total cost of a developer can exceed $200,000 per year!

When you build an offshore team, you’re hiring professionals with the same skills and experience at market-appropriate rates for their location. And here’s the important part: lower cost doesn’t mean lower quality.

For example, our partners have set up world-class teams in Bangalore, saving 25-40% on total costs per engineer. These teams have been pivotal to launching companies’ new products and accelerating delivery.

Round-the-clock development and faster delivery

One of the most overlooked benefits of offshore teams is the way time zone differences can be an operational advantage.

When your in-house team in London or New York wraps up their day, your offshore team in India is just starting theirs. Development continues around the clock.

This extended development window means you effectively get 16-18 hours of productive work in a single day instead of 8-10.

Here’s how it can work in practice:

This follow-the-sun model accelerates delivery timelines. With the right systems and processes, the time difference between your headquarters and offshore team becomes an advantage thanks to the net gain in development hours.

Full cultural integration and alignment

This is the critical differentiator that separates great offshore teams from mediocre ones, and from working with contractors hired via outsourcing or freelancers.

Outsourced developers treat your project like a task. They complete it and move on to the next client. They have no investment in your product’s success, no understanding of your company’s mission, and no reason to care about long-term quality.

Offshore teams, when built correctly, are different. Your engineers are fully integrated into your company culture, live your values, and understand your mission. They care about the product because they’re part of the team building it.

It starts with recruitment. The right offshore partner assesses cultural fit through personality tests and interviews that evaluate soft skills, communication style, and alignment with your company’s values.

Once hired, your offshore engineers participate in an onboarding process that introduces them to your company’s history, product roadmap, customers, and long-term goals. They get access to the same systems, communication channels, and documentation.

Johnson Health Tech (JHT), a fitness equipment manufacturing company, made cultural integration its top priority when building its offshore team in Bangalore. According to Adith Khan, Director of Partner Success at The Scalers, “JHT’s offshore team is an extension of their in-house product development team, not just additional resources.”

Knowledge retention and institutional memory

If you’ve tried outsourcing or working with freelancers, you know how challenging it is to retain knowledge within your company. Contractors come and go, finish projects and disappear. Their knowledge walks out the door when the project ends.

With offshore teams, you build institutional memory because you’re building a team with engineers who stay with your company for years, sometimes five, ten years, or longer.

These specialists learn your codebase inside out. They understand the technical decisions made years ago and why they were made, know which parts of the system are fragile, and which features are most critical.

This knowledge stays with your offshore team and gets passed down every time a new engineer joins.

Reduced technical debt

Offshore teams help you reduce technical debt instead of adding to it. Here’s why:

The payoff is a codebase that stays maintainable as you scale, not one buried under shortcuts and quick fixes.

Core business and product development focus

Sourcing candidates, screening resumes, conducting technical interviews, negotiating offers, onboarding new hires… all these activities are time-consuming and pull you away from what actually matters: building your product and growing your business.

When you partner with the right offshore company, they handle all of that for you. They manage:

In other words, you get a fully operational team without the operational headache. This frees you up to focus on what you do best: product strategy, technical architecture, customer needs, and business growth.

Complete intellectual property control and ownership

A question some tech leaders ask when setting up offshore teams is: “Who owns the code?” The answer is simple: You do. Completely.

When you build an offshore team, the engineers are hired by you at the final stage. They work exclusively for your company, so the code they write, the features they build, the innovations they create, all of it belongs to you, with no third-party complications.

This is a critical differentiator from outsourcing, where external vendors might claim ownership of IP or reuse code across multiple clients. With a dedicated offshore team, there’s no ambiguity. Your engineers sign the same employment contracts and IP agreements as your in-house team would.

Robust security and data protection

Security is one of the top concerns tech leaders have when considering offshore teams. And it’s a valid concern, since you’re trusting a team thousands of miles away with sensitive data and access to production systems.

The best offshore software development companies hold certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001, which confirm they comply with international standards for information security management. They implement the same strict security practices as your in-house team:

• Access controls: Role-based permissions and multi-factor authentication.
• Data encryption: End-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest.
• Network security: Firewalls, VPNs, and intrusion detection systems.
• Compliance: GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA (depending on your industry).
• Regular audits: Third-party security assessments and penetration testing.

Your offshore engineers sign the same NDAs and security agreements as your local team. They follow the same protocols and are subject to the same monitoring and auditing.

Seven West Media, an Australian media company, had serious concerns about data security when considering an offshore team. “As a media conglomerate capturing millions of data points every single day, data privacy and security were of the utmost importance for their operations,” explains Adith Khan.

The Scalers addressed this concern through multiple layers of security. “We solved this in several ways,” Adith says. “First, we’re ISO 27001 and GDPR compliant. Second, instead of giving engineers direct access to systems, they log in via VPN to access the organisation’s code, never on their local machines. We also provide access control to the cabins and ensure physical security, so the areas where engineers work are secured.”

Long-term scalability and sustainable growth

Building an offshore team creates a foundation for long-term, sustainable growth. You can start with just a few engineers and scale to 10, 50, or even 100+ as your business expands. You decide on the team’s size, when to add more people, and which roles you need.

Look at Preqin, a UK FinTech that went from 4 engineers to over 450 in just five years. What began as a small team became a top-quality R&D Centre in Bangalore, with specialists who collaborated to build Preqin Pro, the company’s flagship product.

With offshore teams, you have complete flexibility:

The team you build today can scale with your business for years to come.

Best practices for building successful offshore teams

Now that we’ve analysed the benefits of offshore teams, it’s time you know the best practices that separate successful offshore setups from the ones that fail.

We’ve learned many lessons on how to build and structure offshore teams in the past decade, and we’re sharing here the most important ones:

• Start with experienced engineers, not coordinators. Your first offshore hires should be senior developers who can work independently with your product leads and technical stakeholders. They need to grasp your business context and standards before anyone manages them. Add project managers only when coordination actually becomes a bottleneck.
• Choose your founding team carefully. The initial engineers you bring on will define how everyone else works. One of them will likely become the culture carrier who trains newcomers and upholds your standards.
• Assign specific responsibilities to each role. Don’t just hire “developers” and hope things work out. Map out what you need: someone leading the technical direction, a few veterans tackling tough architectural problems, engineers executing defined features, and a QA specialist catching bugs early.
• Get new hires involved in real conversations immediately. Don’t just hand them documentation and walk away. Include them in sprint planning, product discussions, and even customer calls from week one. They’ll learn faster by seeing how your team actually makes decisions than by reading about it.
• Let engineers make decisions and own the results. Walk them through your thought process when weighing options: how you balance speed with quality, new features with maintenance, quick wins with sustainable architecture… Once they understand how you think, they’ll stop waiting for direction and start solving problems on their own.
• Create space for learning and skill development. Engineers stay motivated when they’re growing. Get them involved in architecture discussions, let them work on different parts of your system, sponsor courses or certifications they’re interested in, and give them room to prototype ideas they want to explore.
• Give engineers time and tools to do R&D. Some of your offshore engineers might have deeper expertise in specific technologies than your in-house team. Give them time to research, experiment, and propose solutions.
• Go visit your team as soon as possible. Book a flight and meet your team face-to-face within the first few months. Eating a meal together and spending time outside of video calls builds trust faster than anything else. Your engineers will see you as a real person who cares, not just a voice on video calls.
• Invite high performers to your headquarters. Once your team has been delivering solid work for a while, bring your strongest contributors to your main office. Let them meet stakeholders, see how the broader company operates, and feel like they’re part of something bigger. They’ll return energized and spread that momentum to the rest of the team.
• Make work enjoyable. Celebrate wins, recognise good work, and create opportunities for your team to connect beyond their daily tasks. When engineers relocate for your role, they’re often starting fresh in a new city. If work is all they have, they’ll burn out. Make sure they’re building connections and having fun along the way.

These practices have proven effective across the offshore teams we’ve built. If you want to dive deeper into setting up offshore teams that actually work, check out our complete guide on how to structure offshore development teams.

Why The Scalers’ model delivers unique advantages for offshore teams

You’ve seen the benefits of offshore teams and the best practices that make them work. Now the question is: how do you actually build one that delivers results?

At The Scalers, we’ve built over 130 dedicated offshore teams in Bangalore, India, for companies of all sizes and industries since 2014. We’ve helped them scale from initial teams of 5 engineers to offshore development centers with 450+ specialists, maintaining quality and cultural alignment throughout.

Take allpay, a UK FinTech that faced a critical hiring challenge. Located outside major tech hubs like London, they had exhausted their local talent pool. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rising attrition rates and hiring times reaching 40-50 days made scaling nearly impossible.

After partnering with us, they built a nine-person offshore team, including senior developers skilled in C#, .NET, Azure, and React. The team was fully integrated into allpay’s existing Scrum teams and helped deliver the direct debit platform, one of the company’s most financially significant projects.As of November 2025, the offshore team has maintained zero attrition, a testament to full integration and meaningful work.

Are you ready to build an offshore team that actually works, one that’s dedicated, culturally aligned, and built for long-term success? Get in touch, and one of our senior executives will contact you to discuss your needs.
Or, if you want to learn more about how we’ve helped other companies succeed, check out our case studies.