Oct 8, 2026 · 13 min read

Dedicated Offshore Team Setup: A Week-by-Week Plan for US Companies

Choosing a vendor is half of the job. The other half is the setup: contracts, accounts, a working agreement across six or more time zones, onboarding, and the first sprints that decide whether the team becomes productive or stays a cost line. This is the plan we use with US clients who bring on a dedicated team from Central Europe, week by week, with the checklists and an overlap planner you can use for your own setup.

Andrew LaminskyCTO at Gilzor

In this article

The short version

Setting up an offshore dedicated team takes about 10–12 weeks from vendor shortlist to the first production release, if you run legal, security and onboarding in parallel instead of in sequence.
With a Central European team (Warsaw is ET+6, Cyprus ET+7) plan for a fixed overlap window of 2–4 hours with the East Coast, and remember the DST weeks in March and late October when the gap shrinks by an hour.
Create every account in your own organization, behind SSO with MFA and least-privilege roles. Offboarding should take less than a day.
Paperwork for a US company: MSA, SOW, IP assignment, NDA and a data processing agreement, plus a W-8BEN-E from the vendor instead of a W-9. The vendor employs the engineers, so you carry no foreign employment risk.

Jump to

The whole setup on one page
Week-by-week plan
The time-zone working agreement
Overlap planner
Tooling, access and security
Legal and payments
The first 90 days
Setup checklist
Setup mistakes we see most often
Where Gilzor fits

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The whole setup on one page

From the first vendor shortlist to the first production release, a well-run setup takes 10–12 weeks. The usual mistake is running the workstreams one after another: legal review starts after the vendor is chosen, security review starts after legal, and the team waits for laptops and access in week six. Run them in parallel and the engineers can be writing code in week four.

A 12-week setup with parallel workstreams. Orange marks the two items that most often delay a start: security access and the first production release.

Week-by-week plan

The plan assumes a vendor that has engineers available and a team of three to six people. How to choose that vendor is a topic of its own, covered in how to hire a dedicated development team; here we start from the moment you're ready to shortlist.

Week 0: internal preparationName the backlog owner on your side and give them 5–10 hours a week. Write a one-page brief: product, stack, roles, budget, start date, overlap needs. Ask your security or IT lead for their requirements now, not in week three. Decide who signs the contract and who approves invoices.
Week 1: shortlistThree to five vendors that run dedicated teams in your stack. Send the brief and ask each for proposed people (CVs, not profiles), the overlap window they will commit to, and a sample MSA. Their response time is your first data point on communication.
Week 2: interviews and proposalsInterview the actual engineers, including a technical session with your lead. Ask the vendor to put the team composition, rates, overlap window, replacement terms and notice period in writing. Start the legal review of the sample MSA in parallel.
Week 3: contract and access requestsSign the MSA, SOW and NDA. Send the vendor your security questionnaire and the list of systems the team will need. Create accounts and groups so that access can be granted the day the team starts.
Week 4: onboardingKickoff call with the whole team, product walkthrough, architecture walkthrough, access verified on day one. Each engineer gets the project running locally by day two and picks a small, real ticket. If anyone can visit in person, this is the week.
Weeks 5–6: sprint 1Short sprint with real but low-risk work: bugs, small features, test coverage. Goal: every engineer has merged code, passed review and seen it deployed to staging. The team lead documents gaps in onboarding docs as they hit them.
Weeks 7–8: sprint 2 and first releaseFirst production release that contains the team's work. Small is fine. What matters is that the whole path (review, CI, staging, approval, production) works with the new team in it.
Weeks 9–12: sprints 3 and 4The team takes on a feature of real size. You start tracking lead time, release frequency and returned tasks. At week 12, run the first retrospective with both sides and set goals for the next 90 days.

The time-zone working agreement

Teams in Central Europe are offshore for US companies: there is a daily window of shared time, not a shared day. Teams that do well treat that window as a scarce resource and agree in writing how to use it. Here are the numbers to plan with.

Poland (Warsaw): ET+6, CT+7, MT+8, PT+9.
Cyprus (Nicosia, Limassol): ET+7, CT+8, PT+10.
The DST weeks: the US moves clocks on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November; Europe on the last Sundays of March and October. For about three weeks in March and one week around late October the gap is an hour smaller (Warsaw is ET+5). Put both dates in the shared calendar, or your standup will start an hour off twice a year.
Holidays: Poland has 14 public holidays (Christmas Eve was added in 2025), the US 11 federal ones, and they mostly don't coincide. Share both calendars in week one and plan releases around them.

Team schedule in Warsaw	Same hours in New York	Overlap with a 9:00–17:30 ET day	Overlap with a 9:00–17:30 PT day
9:00–17:30 (standard)	3:00–11:30	2.5 hours (9:00–11:30 ET)	none
10:00–18:30	4:00–12:30	3.5 hours (9:00–12:30 ET)	0.5 hours (9:00–9:30 PT)
11:00–19:30	5:00–13:30	4.5 hours (9:00–13:30 ET)	1.5 hours (9:00–10:30 PT)
12:00–20:30 (late shift, for a lead only)	6:00–14:30	5.5 hours	2.5 hours

Standard time on both sides. A late shift is sustainable for one or two people, such as the team lead, not for the whole team.

Working agreement template

Core overlap window: 9:00–12:30 ET, Monday to Friday. All recurring meetings live inside it. Outside it, nobody is expected to be online.
Standup: 9:15 ET, 15 minutes, camera on. Written standup notes posted by the team before your day starts.
Response times: questions in the window answered within an hour; questions outside it by the start of the next window. Blockers flagged with a dedicated tag so they're answered first.
End-of-day handoff: each engineer posts what's done, what's next and what they need from you. You answer before the end of your day so the team starts with answers, not questions.
Decisions: made in the window, recorded in a decision log the same day. Anything decided in a call that isn't written down didn't happen.
Incidents: one named on-call person per side, an escalation path by phone, and an agreed definition of what counts as urgent outside hours.
Calendar: both countries' public holidays and the DST weeks, shared in week one.

How to run meetings and reviews inside that window over the long term is covered in how to manage a dedicated development team.

Overlap planner

Pick your office time zone and working hours, and the team's location and start time. The planner shows the shared window in your local time.

Overlap planner

Your office Your workday starts at Team location Team workday starts at (local) Time of year

Shared working hours per day

-Shared window in your local time

ComfortableRoom for a standup, a planning session and same-day answers.

WorkableFit all meetings into the window and use written handoffs for the rest.

Mostly asyncShift one side's hours, give the team lead a later shift, or consider a nearshore vendor.

Assumes 8.5-hour days including lunch. A later team start helps until about 11:00; beyond that, ask for a late shift for the team lead only.

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Tooling, access and security

The rule that prevents most setup problems: everything lives in your organization, and vendor engineers are guests with the smallest roles that let them work. It makes onboarding a matter of adding people to groups and offboarding a matter of removing them, and it means nothing needs to be "handed over" if the engagement ends.

System	Owned by	Team access	When
Identity (Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra, Okta)	You	Guest or contractor accounts, SSO, MFA enforced	Week 3
Source code (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket)	You	Team members with write access; protected main branch; required reviews	Week 3
CI/CD	You	Run pipelines; secrets managed by you, never in the repo	Week 3–4
Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure)	You	Dev and staging roles; production read-only or none at first	Week 4, production later
Project tools (Jira, Linear, Notion, Confluence)	You	Full members of the project spaces	Week 3
Chat (Slack, Teams)	You	Shared channels or guest accounts; no access to HR or finance channels	Week 3
Production data	You	None by default; anonymized or synthetic data for development	Case by case
Laptops	Vendor	Vendor-managed, encrypted disks, up-to-date OS, endpoint protection	Before week 4

A few points that come up in nearly every US security review:

Questionnaire, not certificate. Large vendors may have SOC 2 or ISO 27001. Many good small and mid-size vendors don't. Ask for their security policy, how they handle offboarding, device management and incident response, and judge the answers.
GDPR is a plus here. A vendor based in the EU operates under GDPR, so documented security measures and a data processing agreement are routine for them. If your product handles health data, you'll also need a HIPAA business associate agreement before the team sees any protected data.
Production access in steps. Start with none. Add read-only access to logs and monitoring after the first month, and write access to production only for named people with a clear reason.
Offboarding in a day. Because accounts live in your SSO, removing someone means disabling one account. Test it once in the first month.

Legal and payments

For a US company, working with a foreign vendor is simpler than hiring abroad directly. The vendor employs the engineers, pays their taxes and benefits and complies with local labor law. You buy a service, so there is no foreign employment, misclassification or permanent establishment risk on your side, which you would carry if you contracted individual developers or need to manage through an employer-of-record service (typically several hundred dollars per person per month on top of salary).

Documents: a master services agreement, a statement of work per team, IP assignment (all work product is yours on payment), a mutual NDA, and a data processing agreement if personal data is involved. What good clauses look like is in our software outsourcing contract guide.
Governing law: many Central European vendors accept a US state's law or international arbitration. Agree on it early, because it affects the rest of the review.
Tax forms: a foreign vendor provides Form W-8BEN-E, not a W-9, and payments for services performed outside the US to a foreign company are generally not subject to US withholding or 1099 reporting. Confirm with your accountant for your case.
Invoicing and payment: monthly invoices in USD are standard. International wires cost roughly $15–50 per transfer on the sending side, and payment platforms can be cheaper. Net 15 or net 30 terms are common; some vendors ask for the first month in advance.
Exit terms: 30 days of notice per person, a handover obligation, and immediate return of access. Agreeing on these while everyone is optimistic is far easier than later.

The first 90 days

The setup is done when the team runs without special attention. These are the milestones we aim for, with the numbers that tell you whether you're on track.

Goal: everyone productive on small, real work.
Signals: every engineer merged code in the first week; local setup takes under a day; onboarding docs updated by the team.
Your effort: highest of the whole engagement. Expect 8–12 hours a week from your backlog owner and a few hours from a senior engineer for reviews.

If you're not at the day-60 signals by day 75, don't wait for day 90. The cause is usually one of three things: unclear priorities, missing access, or one engineer who isn't the right fit. All three are cheaper to fix early.

Setup checklist

Tick items as you go. Your progress is saved in this browser.

Setup mistakes we see most often

Access arrives in week six. The team is paid from day one and spends two weeks reading documentation. Request access the day the contract is signed.
All meetings at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 10 p.m. in Warsaw. People will join for a while, then quietly stop doing their best work. Keep recurring meetings in the window.
Production work in the first sprint. The team doesn't know the system yet, and an incident in week two sets a tone that takes months to undo. Start with low-risk tickets.
No written handoffs. With a few shared hours, unwritten context costs a full day per question. Make the end-of-day note a habit from day one.
Judging at week four. Productivity in the first month says little. Judge at day 90 against the signals above.

If your existing code is in poor shape, a short technical review before the team starts saves the first sprints from becoming archaeology.

FAQ

How long does it take to set up a dedicated offshore team?

Plan for 10–12 weeks from the first vendor shortlist to the first production release: about two weeks to shortlist and interview, one to two weeks for contract and legal review, one to two weeks for access and onboarding, and four to six weeks of sprints before the first meaningful release. With a vendor that has engineers available and a client that runs legal and security in parallel, development itself can start within two to four weeks of the first call.

How much time-zone overlap do I get with a team in Poland?

Warsaw is six hours ahead of New York and nine ahead of San Francisco. On standard schedules that gives about two to three shared hours with the East Coast. If the team starts its day at 10:00 or 11:00 local time, the East Coast overlap grows to three or four hours. West Coast companies usually get one to two hours early in their morning. For a few weeks in March and late October the gap is one hour smaller because the US and Europe change clocks on different dates.

What legal documents does a US company need to hire an offshore team?

A master services agreement, a statement of work describing the team and rates, an IP assignment clause (in the MSA or separately), a mutual NDA, and a data processing agreement if the team touches personal data. For tax purposes the foreign vendor gives you a Form W-8BEN-E instead of a W-9. Have a US attorney review the MSA and your accountant confirm the tax treatment for your situation.

Who should own the code repositories and cloud accounts?

You should. Create the repositories, cloud accounts, CI and project tools in your own organization and invite the vendor engineers as members with the minimum roles they need. That way access can be revoked in minutes and nothing has to be transferred if the engagement ends.

Do I need to visit the offshore team?

It is not required, but a visit in the first one to two months pays off. Two or three days of workshops in person, or a visit by the team lead to your office, builds the trust that makes the later asynchronous work smoother. Budget for one or two visits a year.

Where Gilzor fits

We set up and run dedicated teams for US companies from Poland and Cyprus. That is offshore for US clients, and we plan for it: the overlap window, the team lead's hours and the DST weeks are agreed in the proposal before anyone starts. Development starts within two weeks of signing at most, and 98% of our work is delivered on time.

If you want the setup above run with you, we bring the working agreement, onboarding plan and access checklist from day one, and adapt them to your stack and your security requirements. See the stack we work in.

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