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A few more things to keep in mind

We speak the same language

As we have built companies and helped build companies ourselves, we know how important it is to hire the right people for the right fit. We strive to be very selective and essentially wouldn’t send anyone for your review who we would not hire for our own internal projects. We don’t hide behind walls of red tape; we’re always available to talk about your current team and future needs, and happy to hop on a call or grab a coffee any time. While the founding team is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are also oftentimes in LA, Seattle, Portland, New York, Boston, Austin, Boulder, Salt Lake City, Chicago, London, and Barcelona, so if you’re around those parts, there’s a pretty good chance we can cross paths soon.

Team integration

Given all of the above, it is very important that your team members feel fully integrated into the larger global team and corporate culture, so we highly encourage, when possible, that you add them to your team page on your website, allow people to list your company on their LinkedIn, and so on. Effectively, they are an integral part of your team, and everything that helps further build that loyalty is very motivating for everyone involved.

Travel and visas

To further build team cohesion, face-to-face time can be very useful. To this extent, whenever you’d like to bring people over for onboarding or training, or if you would like to visit the team for a few days or a couple weeks at a time, we are happy to help with arranging travel and accommodations, provide visa support for the team, and so on. For teams that are distributed between our offices within Ukraine, we also cover the costs of travel between offices when necessary.

No bench

Unlike many of the giant outsourcing companies, we don’t have benchwarmers hanging around waiting for new projects to come by—everyone is recruited specifically for your team, based on your specific requirements. This further helps avoid misaligned incentives, and we’ll never try to place a candidate just for the sake of placing a candidate.

Technical interview that fits your process

After our prescreening steps, we encourage you to run the candidates through necessary steps consistent with your usual interviewing process to ensure the best match from both the technical perspective and the culture fit. If you’d like to conduct real-time technical tests, or would like us to administer your standard tests and pass along the results, we can accommodate this as well.

Communication

Another key to maximizing the effectiveness and cohesion of the team is to make sure they are fully onboarded onto your communication tools and workflows, repositories, Slack channels, and so on. We don’t force one-size-fits-all tools for the team on our end.

Time difference

The question about time difference and its impact on building effective team communications, understandably, comes up a lot. Ukraine is in the Eastern European time zone, which is 10 hours ahead of the West Coast, 7 hours ahead of the East Coast, and 2 hours ahead of the UK. Every client works out an optimal schedule and development processes with their team to maximize effective overlap of at least a few hours every day. While it is certainly possible for a team to overlap the West Coast schedule entirely, we don’t recommend it to avoid burnout, and every client that we have across the globe has deemed the time difference to be a non-issue after having worked with their remote team for just a few days.

Technical management on the client’s side

One thing that we insist on is that our clients always retain direct technical management of the project, or at the very least have a technical management contact available to the team. In our experience, such division of responsibilities leads to the most successful and sustained outcomes for our clients.

Team sizes

We work with teams of various sizes, so whether you’re starting from a single engineer and building up the team to as many as you need, or have a need to bring on a team of several people at the same time, we can make it happen.

Intellectual property, privacy, and confidentiality

This one goes without saying – all of the team members are recruited specifically for your team and work full-time on your projects, the client IP or data are never shared outside of the immediate team, and our Master Services Agreement is very client-friendly, including all the important aspects of intellectual property rights. All work product is subject to the standard work-for-hire framework within the meaning of the US copyright law, and all rights, title, and interest are explicitly assigned to the client.

Straightforward contract and payment terms

Agile Fuel LLC is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, and your Master Services Agreement will be in place with our company directly, just like it would be with any other US vendor – you never have to figure out the arcane global tax, accounting, and compliance practices, since we take care of all of those on our end. Similarly, the services are billed once, at the end of the calendar month, with the invoice balance payable directly to our US bank account.

Team location

Our primary offices for dedicated teams are located in Kharkiv and Kyiv, the two largest cities in Ukraine. We also have fast-growing satellite locations in Odessa, Dnipro, and Lviv, and for projects that are open to recruiting the best talent available, regardless of location, we can also hire individual engineers remotely across the entire country. We are also on track to further scale our unique model and establish offices in South America in the second half of 2019.

We are the HR for your remote engineering team

We are always with you throughout the entire process to help with any HR-related needs for recruiting, growing, and nurturing your team—just let us know!

Simple monthly pricing model

We have a very simple cost model, with the fully loaded monthly rates for each specific team member known to you upfront, prior to your very first interview with the candidate, and without any additional fees or unexpected costs. There are also no one-time setup, recruitment, or placement fees that are common in the industry. The only exceptions are when you need specific hardware with very high-performance specs, development boards, or specialized software licenses—in these cases, you can provide those directly, or we can take care of the procurement process and bill you at cost at your next monthly invoice date.

Offer timing

One of the big differences to keep in mind when hiring staff in Ukraine, compared to the long recruiting cycles common in the US and Western Europe is that the job market moves incredibly fast. If you interview a candidate and consider greenlighting the offer, please try to do it as soon as possible, within a few days. As candidates often interview at multiple places at the same time, we can lose them quickly if we don’t move ahead with an offer—waiting for several weeks is a rare luxury.

Who we are

People-Powered Progress: Our Secret to Scaling Success

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Redefining Partnership: Tailored Teams for Transformational Results

Why We Do It

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A few more things to keep in mind

Get in touch

Who we are

People-Powered Progress: Our Secret to Scaling Success

10+

50+

200+

16

Redefining Partnership: Tailored Teams for Transformational Results

Why We Do It

Don’t take our word for it! Hear it from out partners

Don’t take our word for it! Hear it from out partners (doesn't work)

Heading

A few more things to keep in mind

Get in touch

Don’t take our word for it! Hear it from out partners (doesn't work)