Your Engineering Hub in Portugal, Without Opening an Entity First
We build a named senior team for you in Portugal, operate delivery to your roadmap, and transfer the whole thing to you when owning it makes sense.
Somewhere between "hire an agency" and "open a subsidiary" there is a missing option: a team in Portugal that is recognisably yours — your product, your standards, your culture — without you having to incorporate, lease, and recruit in a market you do not know. This is that option, run in three phases with an exit built in.
It exists because both alternatives fail in known ways. Agencies keep the team and the knowledge when you leave. Opening your own entity front-loads a year of legal, payroll and hiring risk before the first commit. Build–operate–transfer sequences the risk instead: prove the team works first, own it second.
And unlike relocating further offshore, a Portuguese hub keeps you inside the EU — one legal space for GDPR and NIS2, one hour from CET, and a senior market we hire from because we live in it.
Build. Operate. Transfer.
Build
We assemble a named team for you from our bench and our network — senior engineers, the stack and seniority agreed before start, people you interview and can refuse. The team is dedicated: your product, your roadmap, nobody split across clients.
Operate
We run the employment, payroll, equipment and delivery discipline; you run the product direction. Biweekly demos, written status, your tools and your repository from day one — so the work, the history and the documentation are already yours.
Transfer
When the team has proven itself and a presence in Portugal makes sense, we hand it over: the people move to your new entity, and we help with the incorporation mechanics and the transition. If you never want to own it, keep it operated — the exit is an option, not an obligation.
Against the alternatives
The two options this replaces, and where each one hurts.
Traditional outsourcing
- Team belongs to the vendor
- Knowledge leaves when you do
- People split across clients
- Exit means starting over
Engineering hub
- Named, dedicated team — yours in practice from day one
- Work lives in your repos throughout
- Senior engineers you interviewed and approved
- Exit means keeping the team, via transfer
Opening your own entity
- Incorporation before the first hire
- Recruiting in a market you do not know
- Payroll, legal and retention risk from day one
- Sunk cost if the experiment fails
Not sure a hub is the right shape yet? Most start smaller, with team augmentation or a dedicated product team, and grow into one.
Common questions
How is this different from just hiring you as an agency?
The team is dedicated and named: your product only, people you interviewed, working in your repositories with your standards from day one. The engagement is designed around an eventual handover rather than around keeping you — documentation, access and history are structured so the transfer is an administrative step, not an extraction.
How big does a hub start, and how fast?
Hubs start small deliberately — a seed of senior engineers proves the model before anything scales. Team shape and start dates depend on your stack and who is free; as with all our work, you get a real date on the first call, not an optimistic one.
What does the transfer actually involve?
You incorporate (we connect you with the local counsel and accountants we use), the team members move to your entity by agreement, and equipment, access and running contracts follow. Because the work always lived in your repositories, there is no code handover — the handover is employment and operations, and we stay through the transition.
What if we never want our own entity?
Then you never transfer — plenty of hubs remain operated indefinitely, and that is a fine outcome. The point of the model is that the option exists and is priced in, so the decision can be made when you have evidence rather than on day one.
What are the commercial terms?
A monthly rate per team member covering employment, equipment, and our operation of the hub, with terms for the transfer agreed upfront so there is no renegotiation cliff later. We publish the shape rather than a teaser number — bring your team plan to a call and you will get the real figures.