Full Scale | Offshore Development Company in the Philippines

## Full Scale: Offshore Engineering Staff Augmentation in the Philippines

Full Scale is an offshore software development company based in the Philippines that places dedicated, senior-level engineers directly onto US-based product and engineering teams. The model is staff augmentation, not project outsourcing. Engineers work inside your repo, attend your standups, and follow your sprint cadence full-time. Full Scale handles recruiting, payroll, benefits, and HR in the Philippines. The buyer gets the engineering output; Full Scale absorbs the operational overhead of building and keeping a team.

The company has been named to the Inc. 5000 list five times, which is a reasonable signal of sustained revenue growth. Founder Matt Watson previously built VinSolutions (acquired for $150 million-plus) and Stackify, so there is genuine software product experience behind the company, not just a staffing background. That matters for buyers evaluating whether a vendor actually understands engineering workflow versus just filling seats.

### What They Actually Do

Full Scale's offering is narrow by design. They recruit, hire, and retain engineers in the Philippines, then embed those engineers full-time on a single client team. The engineer becomes a functional extension of the buyer's internal team. No rotation between clients, no project handoffs, no body-shop pooling. The same person who joins your standup in January is still there in December, and according to the company's own figures, the average Filipino engineer stays on the same client team for multiple years.

Services center on software engineering staff augmentation. The model covers the full recruiting and HR lifecycle in the Philippines, which means sourcing candidates, vetting technical skills, handling local payroll and benefits, and managing retention. The buyer retains direct management of the engineer's daily work. Full Scale describes this explicitly: engineers report up to your engineering leadership, the same as any local hire.

The pricing is stated as a fully loaded rate starting at $35 per hour. That rate covers the engineer's compensation, benefits, payroll taxes, and Full Scale's management overhead. At that rate, a single full-time dedicated engineer works out to roughly $5,600 to $6,000 per month at standard hours. For US-based companies paying $120,000 to $180,000 per year for a mid-to-senior software engineer all-in, the offshore rate represents a meaningful cost difference. The catch, as with any offshore model, is that the saving only materializes if the engineer integrates well and stays. Full Scale's 93% employee retention figure, if accurate and tracked consistently, is notably high for offshore engineering.

### Who They Serve

Full Scale has served 200-plus US companies and currently has 350-plus active engineers on client teams. The AMC Theatres engagement is the most publicly documented case study. AMC's CIO described the team as "fully integrated" with in-house staff, and the .NET team Full Scale staffed has remained embedded for multiple years. That is a real data point, not a generic testimonial, and it suggests the model holds up in enterprise-adjacent environments that require stability and institutional knowledge.

The buyer profile is US-based companies with existing engineering leadership who need to extend their team capacity without the cost and timeline of local hiring. This model works best when you have a product manager or engineering lead who can actually direct the offshore engineer day-to-day. If you are trying to outsource engineering leadership and strategy, this is not the right fit. Full Scale is explicit on this: the engineers report to your leadership.

### Timezone and Language

The Philippines runs GMT+8, which puts it roughly 12 to 15 hours ahead of US time zones. Full Scale addresses this directly by having engineers work shifts that overlap the client's business hours. That is operationally different from the India model, where the time gap typically makes synchronous collaboration difficult. The Philippines is also among the largest English-speaking countries globally, which reduces the communication friction that often shows up in offshore models where engineers can write code but struggle with product conversations.

### Practical Delivery Detail

Pricing is structured as a per-seat dedicated FTE model with a stated floor of $35 per hour fully loaded. Engagements are long-term by design. The company does not publish a minimum engagement length publicly, but the whole model assumes multi-month to multi-year tenures. Short-term project work is explicitly not what Full Scale does.

### What to Verify Before Signing

I would ask Full Scale to walk through exactly how they handle a situation where an engineer is not performing. What is the replacement timeline? Who absorbs the cost of re-onboarding? How is performance feedback structured between the client and Full Scale's HR team? These are the operational pressure points in any staff augmentation model.

I would also confirm how the 93% retention figure is calculated. Is it measured per client engagement or across the Full Scale bench overall? There is a difference. An engineer who leaves one client and moves to another is retained by Full Scale but lost by you.

For regulated industries like healthcare or fintech, ask specifically about data handling agreements, security practices at the Philippine office, and whether any compliance certification applies to their infrastructure. The public profile does not list certifications, so do not assume any are in place.

Full Scale occupies a clear and specific position: long-term dedicated offshore engineering talent for US product companies that have internal leadership but need cost-effective capacity. If that matches your situation, the model is worth evaluating. If you need a vendor to own the project outcome end-to-end, look elsewhere.