How Do You Build a Remote Team in India for a U.S. Company?

A U.S. company has three routes into India: establish its own legal entity, use an employer of record, or use a managed remote workforce company. They differ on who employs, who sources, and who manages. F5 Hiring Solutions runs the third at $375-$1,200 per week, all-inclusive.

Most guides on this topic open with a claim about the size of India's engineering graduate pool and a savings percentage. Both have been removed from this page. The graduate figure was not sourced, and the savings figure compared a real rate against an invented U.S. salary.

What actually decides this is not the talent pool. It is three questions: who is the legal employer, who finds and screens the person, and who manages them when something goes wrong. Each route answers those differently, and the wrong answer is expensive in a way that does not show up for two quarters.

Teams hiring customer-facing or voice roles may also want Philippines vs India for remote hiring before deciding on geography at all.

The Three Routes

Option 1: Direct hire through your own Indian entity

You register a company in India and employ people directly.

What it requires: company registration, a local registered address, a director, an Indian bank account, and ongoing compliance with Provident Fund, Employees' State Insurance, tax deducted at source, and state labour law. Setup runs through legal and accounting professionals and takes months rather than weeks.

Where it fits: sustained hiring at meaningful scale, where the fixed cost of the entity is spread across many people and you want direct employment.

This page previously quoted a specific setup cost and timeline. Both were unsourced and are gone. Get a quote from an Indian corporate services firm; the answer varies enough by state and structure that a general figure would mislead you.

Option 2: Employer of record

An EOR is the legal employer on your behalf.

What it solves: the legal problem. You get compliant employment without an entity.

What it does not solve: the talent problem. You still source, screen, and manage the professional yourself, and there is generally no performance management or replacement mechanism. EOR providers publish their own pricing, usually per employee per month, so take it from them directly.

Option 3: Managed remote workforce

F5 Hiring Solutions is a managed remote workforce company. It is the legal employer in India, sources and screens the candidate, provides equipment, handles HR and payroll, and manages the engagement. The professional is assigned exclusively to one client, and you direct the work.

Where it fits: you want a full-time person without an entity, and you want sourcing and replacement handled rather than run yourself.

Where it does not: fractional work, short engagements, or a candidate you have already found and only need employed. That last case is an EOR.

What It Costs

F5 Hiring Solutions places at $375-$1,200 per week, all-inclusive pricing covering salary, HR, equipment, and management, with full-stack developers at $375-$650 per week.

All-inclusive means the weekly rate is the whole cash cost: no recruiting fee, no setup fee, no equipment charge, no termination cost. Replacement is included at zero cost within 7-14 days.

A six-row table setting per-role weekly rates against U.S. annual salaries, with a savings column, used to sit here. It has been removed rather than repaired. The U.S. figures were not sourced to anything, which made the entire savings column a subtraction from an invented number.

To make that comparison properly, take the fully loaded cost of your last comparable U.S. hire from your own payroll records, annualise the weekly rate, and compare the two over the same period. That number is specific to you, which is the only version worth acting on.

Legal Points to Settle Before Anyone Starts

Whoever is the legal employer carries Provident Fund contributions, Employees' State Insurance where applicable, tax deducted at source, and state labour law compliance. If that is your provider, confirm in the contract which party carries each obligation rather than assuming the answer.

Two more worth settling in writing: intellectual property assignment, and where data may be processed and stored. Both are straightforward to agree at the start and awkward to renegotiate once work is under way.

Quality and Productivity

F5 Hiring Solutions screens candidates before presentation, sourcing from 85,500+ candidates in our internal sourcing and screening database, and presents shortlisted profiles with assessment results.

This page previously claimed clients see "only the top 3%" of candidates. That figure was not measured against anything and has been removed. Selectivity claims of that shape are common in this market and are almost never verifiable; treat any provider's version, including this one's absence, accordingly.

What you can check yourself is more useful: ask what the screening actually tested, ask to see the assessment output rather than a summary, and ask what happens in week three when something is not working.

How the Process Runs

Define requirements. Role scope, tools, hours of overlap, and what a correct output looks like.

Sourcing and screening. F5 runs your requirements against the candidate network and screens for technical skill and communication.

Shortlist and interview. Profiles arrive within 7-14 business days with resumes and assessment results. You interview and select.

Onboarding and start. Employment paperwork, equipment, and system access. Most professionals begin within 30 days of offer acceptance.

Integration. Standards documentation, supervised early work, then independent delivery.

The previous version of this section gave a day-by-day schedule that had the professional fully onboarded inside 14 days, which contradicted both the shortlist window and the 30-day start stated elsewhere on the same page. The timings above are the published commitments.

Common Mistakes

Choosing the route before the question. Companies pick an EOR and then discover they still have to source, or set up an entity for three hires.

Leaving the overlap window unagreed. "US hours" means different things to different providers. Write down the actual hours.

Not documenting standards. The first remote hire exposes every convention nobody wrote down. That cost was already being paid; it just becomes visible.

Treating replacement terms as boilerplate. They are the part that determines what a wrong hire costs you.

Where to Go Next

F5 Hiring Solutions has 250+ companies served since inception and reports a 95% client retention rate, measured as clients who continue beyond the first 3 months.

Schedule a 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/joel-f5hiringsolutions/f5