IT Outsourcing in Kosovo
We are eleven people in Prishtina building software for companies in twelve countries. Here is honestly how that works, including the parts harder than the sales pitch suggests.
Outsourcing has a reputation problem and most of it is earned. The common story goes like this. You hire an agency, you get a good team for the first month, then the strong engineers rotate onto a newer account and you are left with whoever is available. Communication degrades into status reports. Nobody on the vendor side actually cares whether the product works.
We started Brigada in 2024 partly because we had watched that happen from the inside. The way we operate is a reaction to it. Small team, people stay on their projects, and the founders are in the code and in the client calls rather than only on the contract.
Why Kosovo, specifically
Kosovo is in Central European Time, which puts us in the same working day as all of Europe and gives us a solid overlap with the US East Coast in our afternoons. For UK and EU clients that means an ordinary working relationship with no asynchronous handoff ritual. For US clients it means your morning is our afternoon, and standups actually happen live.
The talent pool is younger than Western Europe and it is genuinely good. Kosovo has a large population under thirty, English is widely spoken to a professional standard, and the engineers we work with have been building for international clients from the start rather than adapting to it later.
The cost difference is real, and we would rather be plain about it than pretend it is not part of the reason you are reading this page. Rates here are meaningfully below London, Zurich or San Francisco. That is not because the work is worth less. It is because the cost of living in Prishtina is different.
How engagements are structured
Three models, and we will tell you which one fits rather than selling you the most expensive one.
- /Dedicated team. A named group working only on your product, joining your standups and your tooling. This is what Vector Guest and Oly Care have, and it works best for anything long running.
- /Project build. A defined scope with a start and an end, which suits a first version or a specific platform. Kinsail and Evergreen Valleys were built this way.
- /Embedded engineers. One or two of our people inside your existing team, reporting into your leads. Street Wallet works like that.
What we ask from you
This is the part most outsourcing pages leave out, and it is the biggest predictor of whether an engagement goes well.
We need one person on your side who can make decisions, and we need them reachable. Not a committee, not a weekly sync where questions queue up for six days. Projects that struggle almost always struggle because the answer to a blocking question took four days to arrive, not because the engineering was hard.
We also need honesty about constraints early. Regulatory requirements, an existing system nobody wants to touch, a launch date already promised to a board. None of those are problems on day one. All of them are problems in month four.
The team you get
Eleven people. Two founders who are still hands on, engineers across Laravel, React, Vue, Python, React Native and AWS, plus DevOps and QA. Everyone works on a small number of projects rather than being spread across eight.
You will know their names. They will be in your Slack. When someone goes on holiday you will hear about it in advance from them, rather than discovering it through silence.
Work we have actually shipped
Twelve clients across twelve countries. A few of the longer relationships:
Six years in production and we still run the engineering team. The best evidence we can offer that people stay on projects here, because the same relationship has outlasted most agency contracts several times over.
Engineering team of record on a multi year retainer for a UK healthcare staffing platform. Launched the first version in ten weeks and have been the backbone of the product since.
A dedicated full time Brigada team shipping weekly with the founding operator, who opened their entire stack to us. That level of access only happens when the working relationship is genuinely close.
Product, design, engineering and on-call for a platform used by US law enforcement in six states. A US client working with a Kosovo team on software with a compliance boundary, which is the case people assume cannot work.
Questions we get asked
What timezone do you work in?
Central European Time. We overlap the full working day with the UK and EU, and roughly 14:00 to 18:00 CET with the US East Coast. Several of our engineers shift later deliberately for US accounts.
Is the whole team in Kosovo?
Yes, based in Prishtina. That is deliberate. It means the team knows each other, reviews each other's code, and can solve something in a room when it matters.
How do you handle contracts and intellectual property?
You own the intellectual property and the code from the first commit, held in your own repository. Contracts are straightforward and we are used to working under NDAs and client paper rather than insisting on our own.
What happens if we want to stop?
You keep everything and we help with handover. We would rather end an engagement cleanly and be recommended than lock someone into a relationship they have outgrown.
Do you work with startups or only established companies?
Both. Kinsail and Oly Care were early stage when we started. Avilog and Walter are established businesses. What matters more than stage is whether there is someone who can make decisions quickly.
How quickly can you start?
Our typical gap from kickoff to first production deploy is under two weeks. Actually starting depends on current capacity, and if we cannot staff you properly we will say so instead of taking the work and figuring it out later.
Related
Tell us what you are building
We will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it, including when the answer is no. First reply usually comes the same working day.