An offshore development centre in India
An offshore development centre is a dedicated, long-running team that works only for you, from an office in the delivery country. Ours is in India. We hire the people you approve, employ them on our payroll as the employer of record, and run the centre as a standing team on your roadmap. You get a durable part of your organisation without registering a company or carrying a country's worth of overhead.
What an offshore development centre actually is
An offshore development centre, usually shortened to ODC, is a dedicated technology team that works from a provider's office in the delivery country and stays for the long run. The distinction that matters is dedicated and standing. The centre is not a shared pool you rent hours from, and it is not a project that closes when the brief is met. It is a named team, in your tools and on your roadmap, that behaves like a part of your own company while someone else carries the office, the payroll and the day-to-day running of it.
For a firm in the Gulf, India is a natural place to put one. The talent pool is deep, the cost per seat is far below hiring the same seniority at home, and the working day overlaps almost entirely with yours, since India is about one and a half to two and a half hours ahead of the Gulf. You brief the team in the morning and see the work move the same day, not overnight.
The ways to run one
There are four common shapes. They differ in who employs the team and who carries the risk.
Run through a partner
A vendor-run centre, where a provider hires and manages the team for you, or an employer-of-record-run centre, where a provider legally employs the team while you direct the work. Both let you start in weeks, pay per seat, and skip the entity. Outpost is the second of these. We employ the team in India and you run the roadmap.
Own it yourself
Your own captive, where you register an entity in India and run the centre directly, with outright control and the full overhead that comes with it. Or build operate transfer, the bridge between the two: a partner builds and runs the team, then hands it to your entity once it is proven. Both suit a larger, long-term function you intend to own.
How Outpost runs your ODC
We define the roles, the stack and the seniority with you, then source and assess against that brief. Every candidate arrives with a written assessment and you make the final call on who joins, so the people who onboard are people you chose. We put the team on our payroll in India, in a secure workspace, as the employer of record, with the access and equipment to be productive from the first weeks. Most centres start small and grow as the work does.
From there the team works to your roadmap and reports into you, day to day. We carry payroll, HR, retention, security and compliance, and one engagement lead is accountable for the centre. Your intellectual property and work product are assigned to you, and every engineer signs confidentiality and IP terms. We are ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and built for India's DPDP Act, so the data the team touches is handled to standard.
Where this differs from a project agency. An agency takes a brief, delivers it and moves on, and the context leaves with the people who held it. An ODC is dedicated and standing: the same named team works only for you, keeps the knowledge over time, and keeping that team whole is our responsibility, not something that ends when a project closes. That continuity is usually the whole reason to run a centre instead of buying projects.
Common questions
What is an offshore development centre?
An offshore development centre, or ODC, is a dedicated, long-running technology team that works for you from a provider's office in the delivery country, in this case India. It is not a project you hand off and get back. It is a standing team, in your tools and on your roadmap, that behaves like a part of your own organisation while the provider carries the employment, the workspace and the day-to-day running of it.
What are the ways to run an offshore development centre?
There are four common shapes. A vendor-run ODC, where a provider hires and manages the team for you. An employer-of-record-run ODC, where a provider legally employs the team while you direct the work. Your own captive, where you register an entity and run the centre yourself. And build operate transfer, where a provider builds and runs the team, then hands it to your own entity later. Outpost runs the employer-of-record model.
How much does an offshore development centre in India cost?
With Outpost you pay one transparent monthly fee per seat. It covers the engineer's fully loaded cost and our fee for employing, hosting and running the team, with no recruitment commission on top and no margin buried in an hourly rate. You start small and add roles as the work grows, without the fixed cost of registering and carrying your own entity.
How is an offshore development centre different from a project agency?
A project agency takes a defined brief, delivers it, and moves on, and the people who did the work move with it. An offshore development centre is dedicated and standing. The same named team works only for you, holds the context over time, and keeping that team whole is our responsibility, not something that ends when a project closes.