How a cloud infrastructure The SaaS company replaced a broken contractor workflow with a centralized management system and finally shipped the product on schedule.
Industry:
B2B SaaS / Developer Tools
Team Size:
68 FTE + 52 contractor developers
Headquarters:
Singapore
Project Countries
7 — India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Romania, Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka
Remire Products:
Contractor Management, Background Checks, Compliance, Payroll, Renewals’, Offboarding
The company builds cloud infrastructure tooling for DevOps and platform engineering teams. It is headquartered in Singapore and has a 68-person full-time core team.
It closed its Series B in late 2024. Soon after, pressure increased to ship three major platform features before the next fundraise.
Like most product-led SaaS companies at this stage, it followed a hybrid workforce model. Full-time engineers handled product ownership and architecture. Contractor developers handled sprint execution, feature development, and QA.
By Q1 2025, the contractor bench had grown to 52 developers. They were spread across India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Romania, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
The team included backend engineers, frontend specialists, DevOps contractors, and QA automation engineers.
Engineering leads valued the model. Velocity was strong. But operational issues started to grow. Onboarding became harder. Contracts became complex. Payments were inconsistent.
Compliance also became a concern. The CFO began to worry that contractor arrangements in three countries were close to employment relationships.
The company’s VP of Engineering described the contractor management situation as “a tax on every sprint.” Every time a new developer joined a squad, the team lost a week to paperwork. Every month-end, someone was chasing invoices. Every quarter, legal raised a new concern about classification.
The misclassification risk was the most serious concern. Two of the flagged developers in India had been with the company for over 18 months, worked exclusively for them 40+ hours a week, and used company-provided tools.
Under Indian labor law, that profile is dangerously close to deemed employment, which would trigger back payment of provident fund contributions, gratuity, and potential penalties.
The CFO made the call: the company needed a proper contractor management system before the next audit, before the next sprint, and before anyone else got production access without a background check.
The VP of Engineering and CFO evaluated four platforms. They found Remire, a global hiring platform that helps companies hire, onboard, pay, and manage contractors and employees across 60+ countries. Three things made the decision:
Compliance classification built in
Remire’s contractor management platform included automated misclassification risk assessments for every country. The six flagged relationships in India and the Philippines would be reviewed, remediated, and documented, not just flagged and forgotten.
Remire committed to getting new contractor developers fully onboarded, signing contracts, NDAs, IP assignments, tax documents, and payment setup within 48 hours. For a company where a delayed developer means a delayed sprint, that was the number that mattered.
Remire’s background checks ran in parallel with onboarding for every new contractor. No developer would get to a code review before identity and employment history were verified. The production access gap was closed structurally, not by policy.
Remire’s rollout covered all 52 existing contractors and integrated into the company’s hiring workflow within three weeks.
01
Remire ran classification assessments on all 52 existing contractors. The six flagged developers in India and the Philippines were reviewed against local labor law. Remire’s compliance team provided specific remediation for each: restructured SOWs with defined deliverables, reduced exclusivity, and revised working arrangements that kept the developers productive while bringing the engagements into compliance. All six were resolved within 10 days.
02
Remire replaced the patchwork of MSAs, email confirmations, and missing agreements with locally compliant contract templates for all 7 countries. Each included IP assignment clauses, NDA terms, deliverable definitions, and termination provisions appropriate to the jurisdiction. Every existing contractor was re-papered. Every future contractor would start with the right contract from day one.
03
New contractor developers now receive a single onboarding link that collects identity documents, tax IDs, and banking details; signs contracts; and triggers a background check, all in parallel. The first three developers onboarded under the new system were fully set up, verified, and ready for sprint assignment in 31 hours. The 9–14 day average became a 48-hour SLA.
04
Contractors submit hours and deliverables through the contractor management dashboard. The finance team reviews one consolidated payroll summary per cycle instead of 52 individual invoices. Payments in INR, PKR, UAH, RON, PHP, BDT, and LKR are processed simultaneously. Invoice processing dropped from 4–7 days to same-day approval.
05
Contractor engagements are now tied to sprint cycles in the platform. Start dates, end dates, renewal windows, and offboarding triggers are visible to both engineering leads and the operations team. When a sprint phase ends, the contractor is either renewed or offboarded cleanly, with final payment, IP assignment confirmation, and system access revocation handled automatically.
Within four months of switching to Remire, the impact was visible across engineering velocity, compliance risk, and finance operations.
65%
Faster sprint ramp-up: new devs ready in 48 hrs vs 11 days
0
Misclassification flags after remediation and restructuring
28 hrs
Saved monthly on contractor admin and invoice processing
100%
Contractors on signed, compliant, country-specific agreements
3
Sprint launches were delivered on time, which had previously slipped due to delayed dev onboarding
52
Developers are background-checked and verified before system access
The engineering impact was the most immediately felt. Three consecutive sprint launches hit their dates for the first time in two quarters. The VP of Engineering attributed this directly to contractor developers being ready on day one rather than waiting for contracts to be finalized mid-sprint.
The compliance outcome mattered just as much. The six remediated relationships in India and the Philippines were reviewed by the company’s external counsel post-remediation and confirmed to be within classification guidelines. The CFO closed the outstanding legal risk item that had been sitting on the board’s risk register for two quarters.
And for the first time, every developer with access to production systems had been independently verified. That was a security baseline the company should have had from the start, and now, through Remire’s integrated background checks, it was automatic for every new hire going forward.
This company’s contractor model was a genuine competitive advantage; it let a 68-person team execute at twice the output. But the infrastructure around it was a liability: misclassification exposure, unsigned contracts, unscreened developers in production, and an onboarding process that cost a week of every sprint.
Remire’s contractor management platform addressed all of it in one move. Onboarding that matched the pace of sprint planning. Compliance remediation that closed the legal risk. Background checks are integrated from day one. And a consolidated payment flow that gave the finance team their time back.
The model didn’t change. The infrastructure finally caught up with it.
“We were shipping on a 68-person budget but executing like a 120-person team. The contractor model was the reason. But we were one misclassification audit away from a serious problem, and we had developers in production who’d never been screened. Remire fixed both of those things in the same motion. Onboarding is now a 48-hour handoff, compliance is handled, and I can finally tell the board with a straight face that our contractor workforce is properly managed.”
Confidential — Cloud Infrastructure SaaS, Singapore
Your Contractor Model is Only As Strong As the System Behind It
Remire is a global hiring platform that helps companies hire, onboard, pay, and manage contractors across 60+ countries, compliantly and at the speed your roadmap demands.
