A dedicated development team for a UK business is a group of engineers who work only on your product, in your repository, with your tools, during your working day. They are employed and equipped by us; you decide what they build. It is the closest thing to an in-house team without the recruitment fees, the notice periods or the months of hiring.
Our engineers work from Pakistan, and DataVolve operates from the United Kingdom and Pakistan. Below is exactly how that works for a UK company: the hours, the paperwork and what you compare the cost against.
How UK businesses use a dedicated development team: three models
In short: one dedicated developer, a full product team, or a few specialists added to the team you already have.
| Model | What you get | Who sets direction | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated developer | One senior engineer, full-time on your product | Your CTO or tech lead | You have a lead and a backlog, but not enough hands |
| Full product team | Designer, engineers, QA, DevOps and a project manager | You set priorities; our PM runs delivery | You are building or rebuilding a product without an internal team |
| Staff augmentation | Specific roles slotted into your existing team | Your team, your process | A skills gap: QA, DevOps, mobile, or AI/ML |
If you have nobody to own priorities and simply want a system delivered to a fixed price, a dedicated team is the wrong purchase. A scoped project is safer; see custom software development for UK SMEs, or custom CRM development if the system you need is a CRM.
Which roles can join your team?
In short: the same roles you would hire in-house, added one at a time or together.
User research, flows and clickable prototypes your team can test before code is written.
Front end, back end and APIs in React, Node.js and Python; mobile in React Native and Flutter.
Test plans, automated tests and release checks, so speed does not come at the cost of regressions.
AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and monitoring, set up in your own cloud account.
Sprint planning, a visible backlog and weekly reporting in plain English.
LLM features, document processing and automation. See AI automation for what this looks like in practice.
How many hours overlap with the UK working day?
In short: an afternoon-to-evening shift in Pakistan covers the core UK day, all year round.
Pakistan Standard Time is UTC+5 and does not observe daylight saving. The UK does, so the shift moves by an hour when the clocks change in March and October. The overlap with your day does not.
| UK period | Your day | Same hours in Pakistan (PKT) |
|---|---|---|
| Winter (GMT, UTC+0) | 9:00–17:30 | 14:00–22:30 |
| Summer (BST, UTC+1) | 9:00–17:30 | 13:00–21:30 |
In practice that means a 9:30 stand-up, design reviews before lunch and same-day answers when something is blocked. We agree the overlap hours per role in writing before the team starts, so nobody discovers the gap in week three.
How onboarding works
In short: the team works in your repository and your tools from the first week, not in ours.
From first call to a team shipping in your repository
- Planning callYour product, stack, backlog and the hours you need covered
- Written team plan within 24 hoursRoles, seniority, overlap hours and price in pounds
- Meet the engineersYou speak to the people who will do the work before you sign
- Access set up in your accountsGitHub or GitLab, Jira or Linear, Slack or Teams, least-privilege cloud access
- First small ticket shippedLearns your deploy path in the first few days
- Your rituals from week twoStand-ups, code review, sprint planning and a weekly demo
The onboarding habits that keep remote engineers productive, whoever supplies them, are covered in our guide on how to hire remote developers.
What does a dedicated team cost compared with a UK hire?
In short: a UK hire costs well above the salary; our price is confirmed per role, in writing, in pounds.
When you compare, start from the full cost of employing someone in the UK, not the salary on the job advert:
- Employer National Insurance: 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year for 2026 to 2027, according to HMRC’s rates and thresholds for employers.
- Workplace pension: a minimum 3% employer contribution under automatic enrolment, and many employers pay more.
- The rest: recruitment fees, equipment, software licences, holiday and sickness cover, and the months a role sits empty.
Illustrative example: on a £70,000 salary, employer National Insurance alone is about £9,750 a year (15% of £65,000), before pension, recruitment or equipment.
We do not publish a single monthly rate, because the price depends on the role, seniority and length of the engagement. Each person’s monthly price is confirmed in writing and invoiced in pounds sterling. To model a whole team against in-house hiring, use the in-house vs outsourced development cost calculator; its default figures are illustrative starting points you can change, not our quote.
Does IR35 apply to a dedicated team?
In short: IR35 is about individuals working through their own company; a team employed by a supplier is generally a different arrangement.
GOV.UK describes the off-payroll working rules as applying to a worker who provides their services through their own intermediary, typically a personal service company that the worker controls. For medium and large clients, the client usually has to decide the worker’s employment status.
With a dedicated team from DataVolve, you contract with DataVolve for engineers on our team, not with individuals through their own companies. That is generally a different arrangement from the one IR35 targets, but status turns on the facts, so take your own advice. This is not legal or tax advice.
UK GDPR when engineers work outside the UK
In short: remote access to personal data counts as a transfer, so put the safeguard and the access controls in place first.
The ICO’s guide to international transfers is clear that letting an organisation outside the UK access personal data on your systems is a restricted transfer. Unless UK adequacy regulations cover the destination, you need an appropriate safeguard, such as the International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, and a transfer risk assessment.
How we keep that small and well documented:
- Production data stays in a UK cloud region in your account.
- Engineers develop against anonymised or synthetic data wherever possible.
- Production access is limited to named people and roles, with an audit trail.
- The transfer paperwork your data protection lead needs is in place before access is granted.
How to start
In short: one call, a written plan the next day, engineers in your repository within one to two weeks.
- Book a call and tell us your stack, the roles you need and the UK hours you want covered.
- Receive a written team plan and price in pounds within 24 hours.
- Interview the engineers who will actually do the work.
- Sign, grant access, and ship the first ticket in week one.
Comparing suppliers first? Our guides on software development outsourcing and how to choose a software development company cover what to check, whoever you pick. Need a dedicated team that also covers a US office? See dedicated development teams for US companies, or send us a short brief.