Build nearshore senior engineering teams across Latin America and Pakistan.

Engineering FAQ

The questions we
hear before kickoff.

Full general FAQ at /faq/. Below: the questions specific to this team.

• What is an embedded engineering team?

  An embedded engineering team is a group of engineers who work inside your engineering organization full-time rather than delivering a project from the outside. They join your GitHub, your Jira or Linear, your Slack, and your standup, take roadmap items alongside your US engineers, and stay on the same team long-term. SMASH employs them, handles payroll, benefits, and local compliance, and bills a single monthly rate per role. You manage the work. That is the difference between an embedded team and both a freelance marketplace and a project-based vendor: there is no shared queue, no rotation, and no account manager between you and the engineer.

• How do I hire nearshore software engineers?

  Start with a 30-minute discovery call. We map the stack, the roles you are missing, and the seniority you actually need, then propose a team composition and a start date. Sourcing, technical vetting, and contract setup run in parallel, so the first engineer typically starts two to four weeks later. You interview every candidate before they join, and the engineer we place is the one who stays on your team, not a profile that gets swapped after onboarding.

• How quickly can we get started?

  Most clients see their first embedded engineer start within two to four weeks of the discovery call. We run sourcing, vetting, and contract setup in parallel so there is no dead time. For a full pod of three to five engineers, plan four to six weeks.

• How do you vet engineers?

  We start from a referral network built over eight years in Costa Rica and Colombia. Every candidate clears a technical screen run by a senior engineer (not a recruiter), an English fluency assessment, and a culture-fit interview designed around the actual US team they will join. Fewer than eight percent of applicants complete the full process.

• Why hire developers in Latin America?

  Four reasons, in the order they usually matter. Time zone: LATAM developers work the US business day, so there is no overnight handoff between a question and an answer. English: fluency is a screening requirement for every engineer we place, not something you discover after the first sprint. Depth: Colombia has the largest engineering population in LATAM after Brazil, and Costa Rica has hosted US engineering organizations for decades, so senior people with US-company experience are findable. Tenure: LATAM engineers on our client teams stay for years, which is the part that compounds. Our engineering hiring reach covers Latin America broadly, not only the countries where we run delivery centers.

• What happens if the hire is not a fit?

  We have a ninety-day replacement guarantee. If the fit is not right, for any reason, we restart the search at no additional placement fee. In practice this is rare. The vetting is heavy because we want long-term engagements, not turnover.

• What time zones do your engineers work in?

  Latin America runs on US business hours by default. Costa Rica and Colombia, our two largest delivery centers, sit in the Central or Eastern time zone with full overlap with US working hours, including standups, code review, and incident response. The rest of our LATAM hiring footprint lands in the same band. Pakistan delivery enables 24/7 coverage for teams that need on-call or follow-the-sun engineering.

• How much does a nearshore engineering team cost?

  Pricing is per engineer, per month, the way you would budget an internal hire, not hourly and not per ticket. What moves the number is seniority, specialization (an AI or data engineer prices differently than a mid-level frontend developer), and team size. There is one monthly rate per role that covers salary, benefits, equipment, local payroll, and compliance, so there is no separate placement fee or employer-of-record layer to add on top. We will walk through real numbers for your roles on the discovery call.

• Can we expand the team after starting with one engineer?

  Yes. Most clients start with one or two engineers and grow to an eight to twelve person team within twelve to eighteen months. The same operating model, the same engagement, the same point of contact. We scale at the pace you scale.

• Whose payroll are the engineers on?

  Ours. SMASH employs every engineer directly, handles local payroll, benefits, equipment, and compliance, and bills you a single monthly rate per role. You manage the work day to day. We manage the employment relationship.

• Do your engineers work in our tools and repo?

  Yes. From day one. They join your GitHub, your Jira or Linear, your Slack, your CI pipeline, your standup. They are indistinguishable from your internal team in every system you run.