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Engagement model

Senior engineers inside your team

Your board, your ceremonies, your definition of done — with named engineers who integrate rather than orbit. For the gap you cannot hire into quickly enough, or the skill you need for two quarters, not forever.

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Overview

Best when the team is right and the capacity is not

Augmentation suits teams who know what they are building and how they work, and simply do not have enough hands — or lack one specific skill for a defined stretch. You keep ownership of architecture, process and roadmap. We supply engineers who work the way you already do, and who are honest about the fact that they are new to your domain.

See our work
Platforms we build on
When it fits

The shapes of work this model suits best

Augmentation is the lightest of the three models — and the wrong one if what you actually need is somebody to own an outcome. We will tell you when that is the case.

A hiring gap you cannot wait out

The role is approved and the search will take months. Capacity now, without committing to a permanent headcount before you know the shape of the work.

A skill you need temporarily

A cloud migration, a data platform, an ML component. Specialist depth for two quarters that would sit idle if you hired it permanently.

A deadline that needs more hands

A committed date with more work than the team can absorb. Extra senior capacity on a known plan, rather than a second team building something adjacent.

Cover you have to be sure of

Parental leave, a sabbatical, a key departure. Continuity through a period where the team would otherwise be one person short of viable.

Reliability expertise added to a team that already ran the platform

Argent Energy operated a metering platform with contractual availability targets and no instrumentation capable of demonstrating whether they were met. The team knew the domain; what was missing was reliability engineering practice.

Exactly the shape augmentation handles well: specialist depth added alongside the people who already understood the system, leaving behind service level objectives, telemetry and an incident process the team runs themselves.

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Screenshot of the Argent Energy site homepage

Extra senior hands on a long re-architecture

Meridian Freight's twelve-year-old dispatch monolith had to become a service platform without a day of downtime for the fleet — a programme measured in quarters, not sprints.

Work where added capacity has to arrive already knowing how to be careful. Extraction of a load-bearing seam is not a task you hand to someone who needs the codebase explained twice.

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Screenshot of the Meridian Freight site homepage

Data engineering depth for a forecasting rebuild

Northgate Retail forecast demand across 240 locations through a spreadsheet chain that two people understood. The requirement was clear; the specialist data engineering to replace it was not on the team.

A defined skill for a defined period, working to the client's standards, with the tests and documentation written so the platform outlived the engagement rather than depending on it.

Read case study
Northgate Retail Park sign listing its stores
The hard parts

Where augmentation usually goes wrong

Three failure modes account for most disappointing augmentation engagements. Select one to see how we handle it.

Insights

What we have learned running senior pods, written down

Occasional notes from the people doing the work.

No newsletter cadence to promise yet — we write when there is something worth saying, and you get it in your inbox when we do.

SysStacks
FieldNotes
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Why SysStacks

A senior team, not a supply pipeline

We are a small group of principals and staff engineers, so we cannot place twenty people next week and will not pretend otherwise. What we can do is put people on your team who have operated systems like yours.

50+Projects delivered
15+Senior engineers
3Client regions
7Disciplines
Further reading

How we think about working together

Laptop showing code on a bright office desk

Why small senior pods out-deliver large benches

Laptop glowing in a dark room

The uptime math behind a 99.98% commitment

Laptop open on a desk beside a copper jug and fairy lights

A governance checklist to clear before your first fine-tune

Short of hands, or short of one skill?

Tell us the gap and the timeframe. If augmentation is the wrong model for it, we will say which one is not.

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FAQ

De-risk the engagement with a model that fits the work and people who stay with it

The questions we are asked most about staff augmentation — how it is priced, who owns what, and when we would tell you to pick a different model.

It depends entirely on who is free, and we will give you a real date rather than an optimistic one. We are a senior team rather than a staffing pipeline, so if we cannot staff your requirement well we will tell you instead of sending whoever is available.

We insist on it. Run your normal technical process — pairing exercise, system design, whatever you use for permanent hires. If they would not pass your bar, they should not be on your team.

Yours. Your board, your branching model, your review standards, your on-call arrangement if that is part of the deal. We are joining your team, not running a parallel one alongside it.

Long enough for ramp-up to be worth paying for — realistically a few months. Anything shorter and you are mostly buying someone's learning curve, which is a poor deal for you and we would rather say so.

Augmentation adds people to your team, working your way, under your technical leadership. A dedicated pod brings its own tech lead and takes ownership of a workstream. If you want somebody accountable for an outcome rather than for hours, you want the pod.

Tell us early and we will replace or wind down without a fight. A notice period exists so both sides can plan the handover, not to trap you in an engagement that has stopped being useful.

Yes — your repositories, your cloud accounts, your access controls, subject to whatever security requirements you have. Anything we build belongs to you from the first commit, exactly as it would for a permanent employee.

Often it does. Teams frequently start with one engineer, then move to a dedicated pod once the work justifies its own tech lead — or the other way, scaling back to a single specialist as a programme winds down. Changing model is a conversation, not a new procurement exercise.

Get in touch

Tell us about the gap and how long you need it filled. An engineer — not a sales rep — replies within one business day.

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