// service · embedded engineering team
An embedded senior team.
Your stack, your standups,
our delivery.
Senior designers and engineers join your team on Monday — your tools, your processes, your codebase. No ramp-up. No status reports. Shipped work every week.
rot8's embedded engineering team is a senior pod — designer plus engineers — that joins your existing product team as if they'd been hired full-time. They use your stack, your standups, your Linear, your codebase. You get the velocity of senior hires without the 9-month recruiting loop and without the agency hand-off tax. From €18,000 per month.
- From €18k/month
- Senior pod
- Your stack
- Monthly retainer
// the problem
A team inside your team — not on the other side of a wall.
Your team is good. Your roadmap is bigger than your team. Your CTO has interviewed 40 engineers in the last quarter and hired one. Your investors want the next two product lines shipped this half. Your existing senior engineers are spending half their week mentoring instead of shipping.
You don't need an agency. Agencies want to scope a project, run it on their side of the wall, and hand you a deliverable in twelve weeks. You need a team inside your team, doing the work the way you do the work.
That's this engagement.
// what embedded means
We mean it literally.
- Uses your stack. TypeScript or Go, Postgres or DynamoDB, Vercel or your own AWS — we adapt. We don't impose a “rot8 way.”
- Joins your standups. Same Slack, same Zoom, same daily and weekly cadences. Not a separate channel that your team has to babysit.
- Lives in your Linear / Jira / Shortcut. Tickets are picked from your backlog, written in your conventions, closed in your workflow.
- Pushes to your codebase. Branches in your repo, PRs reviewed by your team, deployed via your CI/CD. We don't build “rot8 modules” you have to integrate later.
- Reports to your engineering lead. Your VP Eng or CTO owns the work. We bring the people; you direct what they ship.
// pod sizes
A typical pod.
| Pod size | Composition | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 1 senior designer + 1 senior engineer | Founder-stage company augmenting a small team or solo CTO |
| Standard | 1 senior designer + 2 senior engineers | Series A team running a parallel workstream alongside the core roadmap |
| Strike | 2–3 senior engineers, no designer | Existing product team with design covered, needs raw engineering throughput on a defined surface |
| Custom | Whatever the work needs | We staff to the work, not to a template |
Every pod has one named lead who's your single contact. No account managers.
// what your team gets
Velocity from week one.
- Velocity from week one. Senior engineers don't need three weeks to ramp on a Postgres schema. They read it, ask the right questions, ship a PR by Wednesday.
- No ramp tax. We've worked across 12 countries and 40+ stacks. Onboarding is a half-day, not a sprint.
- Documentation by default. Every change ships with notes — not because we're being thorough, but because the work needs to outlive us.
- Cultural fit, not cultural import. We adapt to your code review style, your design system, your release cadence.
- An exit ramp, always. Embed runs month to month. End it with 30 days notice. We hand off the work in a way your team can extend immediately.
// what you don’t get
The list of things we won’t do.
- Junior engineers. Not on your project, not as backup. We don't bench-warm with juniors.
- A separate Slack for “rot8 team.” We're in your channels. If your team can't see what we're doing, neither can you.
- Vendor lock. No proprietary frameworks, no rot8-only build tools, no playbooks you have to license to keep using post-engagement.
- Pure body-shop hours billing. We bill monthly. The pod owns shipped outcomes, not timesheet rows.
- Status-meeting theater. Async daily updates. One weekly review. The rest is the work.
// pricing
From €18k per month. Pod size sets price, not hours.
Embed engagements start at €18,000 per month for a small pod (1 designer + 1 engineer) and scale with pod size. Typical Series A engagement: standard pod at €34,000–€42,000 per month, 6-month minimum recommended for the velocity to compound. See Pricing for engagement-shape detail.
// fit
Who this fits — and who it doesn’t.
Yes
- Series A and Series B teams whose roadmap outruns their hiring loop.
- Funded startups with a CTO who needs senior leverage now while the team scales.
- Companies opening a new product line and refusing to slow the existing one.
- Engineering orgs running a critical migration that needs surge capacity from people who’ve done migrations before.
- Non-technical founders who hired a CTO and an early engineer and now need a real team behind them.
No
- Pure offshore hours augmentation. We’re not a body shop.
- Teams looking for the cheapest €/hour. We’re not the cheapest pod you can hire.
- Engagements under three months. Use a Sprint instead.
- Companies that want their vendor to “run point” on the work. The point is yours; we run alongside it.
// quick answers
Embedded engineering, common questions.
How is an embedded engineering team different from staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation gives you bodies billed by the hour, usually offshore, usually junior, usually working in a parallel system. Our embedded team is senior, in your codebase, in your standups, in Europe. We bill monthly for outcomes, not hours. The pod owns work end-to-end inside your team — we’re hires you didn’t have to spend nine months recruiting.What's the minimum embed engagement?
We recommend a 6-month minimum to let velocity compound — most of the value lands in months two through six, after the pod has internalized your codebase. We’ll do shorter for clear-scope augmentation, but we’ll often suggest a Sprint instead. Embeds run month-to-month after the initial term, ending with 30 days notice.Will your team use our stack or theirs?
Yours. We default to TypeScript / React / Next.js / Postgres because those are the most common requests, but we adapt to whatever you run. We’ve embedded into Go, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, AWS, GCP, Vercel, custom infrastructure. The pod adapts to your standards — we don’t impose a “rot8 way.”How much does an embedded engineering team cost?
Pods start at €18,000 per month for one designer plus one engineer and scale with team size. A standard Series A pod (1 designer + 2 engineers) lands at €34,000–€42,000 monthly. Final pricing depends on seniority mix and engagement length. Discount for 12-month commits. See /pricing for the full shape.Can the embedded team eventually be hired full-time?
Sometimes. We’re not a recruiting firm and we don’t take placement fees, but if a senior on the pod is the right long-term hire for you, we can have that conversation. Usually the better outcome is for us to stay embedded while you hire your own team — we hand off cleanly when your hires ramp.
// next step
Three projects this quarter. Two remain.
Apply with the four-step form. We respond inside 48 hours, every time, with a real reply from a named founder.