AI Staff Augmentation & Dedicated Teams

Senior engineers who join your team, work in your timezone, and are useful in the first sprint.

Hiring a senior AI engineer in Western Europe or the US takes months and, once you have found one, a permanent seat is a poor fit for work that runs for two quarters. Staff augmentation solves the timing problem — provided the people you get are actually senior.

That is the part most vendors get wrong. We do not recruit against your brief; we draw from a network of 100+ engineers we have worked with for ten to twenty years, in Latvia, Sweden, and the US. Nobody joins your team as an experiment, and we are candid when we do not have the right person available.

Discuss your project

How it works

  • Named, senior engineers you interview yourself before anyone starts
  • European timezone overlap — Riga is CET+1, giving a full working day with the EU and morning overlap with US East Coast
  • Engineers embedded in your process: your standups, your board, your repositories, your review standards
  • Individual specialists or a full dedicated team with a lead, depending on what you are missing
  • Monthly rolling terms — scale the team up or down as the roadmap changes
  • Continuity: if someone leaves, the replacement comes from the same long-standing network, not a job board

The skills teams actually come to us for

AI and machine learning engineers who have shipped LLM features to production and know where the failure modes are — retrieval quality, evaluation harnesses, streaming that hangs, cost that scales the wrong way. On the TypeScript side that means Mastra, the Vercel AI SDK, and Postgres with pgvector; on the .NET side, Semantic Kernel and Kernel Memory. Full-stack and backend engineers across .NET, Node, Python, Java, and PHP. Mobile engineers for iOS and Android. Data engineers for pipelines, warehousing, and the integration work that makes analytics trustworthy. DevOps and cloud engineers on AWS, Azure, and GCP.

A common pattern: a capable in-house team with no one who has taken a language model to production. One or two experienced engineers alongside them for a couple of quarters changes that permanently — the knowledge stays with your team rather than leaving with a contractor.

Augmentation or a dedicated team

Augmentation means individuals joining your existing team and reporting into your management. You direct the work; we handle contracts, payroll, equipment, and cover. This suits teams that know exactly what they are building and simply lack hands or a specific skill.

A dedicated team means we assemble a self-contained unit — engineers, a technical lead, QA where it is needed — that owns a product area end to end. This suits companies without the internal management bandwidth to direct individuals daily, or those spinning up a new product line alongside existing commitments.

Both run on monthly rolling terms. Roadmaps change, and a contract that punishes you for adapting to that is a contract designed for the vendor.

Why nearshore from Latvia works

Riga sits in Eastern European Time — a full overlapping working day with every EU market, a couple of hours from London, and a real morning overlap with the US East Coast. Meetings happen at reasonable hours for everyone, which sounds minor and is the single biggest predictor of whether a distributed team stays coherent.

Latvia is in the EU, so GDPR, contract law, and IP protection are the same framework your legal team already works in — no data-transfer mechanism to negotiate. English is the working language across our network, and Latvia's engineering culture is closer to Northern European directness than to the report-what-they-want-to-hear dynamic that makes some outsourcing relationships fail slowly and quietly.

What we will not do

We will not send you a CV for someone we have not worked with. We will not staff a role with a junior priced as a senior. And we will not take an engagement when the honest answer is that our network does not currently have the right person free — being told no in week one is cheaper for you than finding out in month three.

That constraint is why the model works. In twenty years and 100+ projects we have never abandoned a client, and our clients' own descriptions of the engineers — fast, precise, and easy to work alongside other teams with — are the reason the network keeps being reused.

Frequently asked questions

How quickly can an engineer start?

Typically two to four weeks from the initial conversation, since we are matching from an existing network rather than recruiting. That window covers your interviews, contracting, and access setup. If nobody suitable is free, we tell you that immediately instead of stalling.

Do we interview the engineers ourselves?

Always. We shortlist from people we know personally and have worked with, and you interview them and decide. Nobody joins your team on our say-so alone.

What is the minimum engagement?

We work on monthly rolling terms with a practical minimum of around three months, simply because shorter than that rarely repays the ramp-up for either side. Scaling the team up or down after that is a conversation, not a renegotiation.

What happens if an engineer leaves mid-project?

The replacement comes from the same network of engineers we have worked with for a decade or more, with a handover period overlapping both people. Because we are a boutique working through a network rather than a body shop, delivery does not bottleneck on any single person.

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Evgueny Lemasov — CEO at ITFriends.AI

Evgueny Lemasov

CEO, ITFriends.AI