A developer and tester for US companies, working from India
Most US teams that hire offshore are not chasing the lowest rate — they are trying to get a build finished without adding headcount. What follows is the practical detail that decides whether that works: when we are both awake, how you pay, who owns the code, and what happens to your users' data.
Hours, money, and the law
The three things that decide whether hiring across a border works.
Your morning is my evening, and that is enough
India is UTC+5:30, which puts me 10.5 hours ahead of New York and 13.5 ahead of San Francisco. I hold 6:30pm to 10pm IST for US calls, which is 8am to 11:30am Eastern and 5am to 8:30am Pacific. That gives Eastern-time teams a comfortable daily window and Pacific teams an early one. The rest is asynchronous by design: you review a pull request when you start your day and the fixes are waiting when you return to it. Work does not stop because we are not on a call.
USD invoices, and the tax form you will ask for
Invoices are issued in USD. Payment by wire, Wise or Payoneer — Wise is usually cheapest and clears in a day or two. Because I am a non-US person providing services performed outside the United States, I supply a signed W-8BEN, and that income is generally not subject to US withholding or 1099 reporting. Your finance team will ask for this form; having it ready is the difference between a same-week payment and a month of email. I am not a tax adviser, so confirm the treatment with yours.
State privacy laws, and what that means for the build
There is no single federal privacy statute, so what binds you depends on where your users are — California's CCPA/CPRA is the strictest and the one most builds are designed against, with Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and Texas close behind. In practice that shapes concrete decisions: what the site logs, how long it keeps it, whether there is a working delete path, and whether a "do not sell or share" signal is honoured. I build to the strictest state you actually serve rather than retrofitting it after your first data-subject request.
What clients here usually need
Replacing a stalled agency build
The most common US brief: a site or product half-delivered by an agency that has stopped responding. The first deliverable is an audit of what exists — what runs, what is dead, what is unsafe — before a line is written.
SaaS and MVP engineering
A working product for a demo or a funding conversation, not a prototype that has to be thrown away. Auth, billing, a real database and a deploy pipeline from day one.
QA on software your team wrote
An independent test suite over an existing codebase, run in your CI. Often the cheapest way to make a small US engineering team confident enough to ship weekly.
Questions from US clients
The ones that come up before a first call.
One overlapping window each weekday, 8am to 11:30am Eastern, for anything that genuinely needs a conversation. Everything else runs through the repository and written updates. In practice most US clients find the gap useful rather than costly: work lands overnight, so their morning starts with something to review rather than something to wait for.
You do, on payment, and it is written into the agreement rather than assumed. Full assignment of copyright in the deliverables, with the repository under your organisation's account from the first commit — not transferred at the end, which is where offshore engagements usually go wrong. Any third-party open-source dependencies are listed with their licences so your legal team is not guessing.
Yes to both. A mutual NDA before anything sensitive is shared, and I work under your MSA and SOW if you have them. Where there is no template, I supply a short fixed-scope agreement covering deliverables, milestones, IP assignment and confidentiality. Disputes are workable under either Indian or your home jurisdiction; I have no objection to the latter for contracts of this size.
Materially less than a US contractor rate, and I would rather be straight about why: the cost of living in Bihar is a fraction of the Bay Area's, not the quality of the engineering. What you should compare is delivered scope, not hourly rate. Rates are quoted per project after a scoping call so there is no hourly meter running while requirements change.