A 60-person platform engineering centre, built on a BOT and transferred in three years.
The team never felt like a vendor’s team. When it became ours on paper, nothing actually changed — which is exactly what you want from a BOT.
The outcome, in numbers.
The situation
The company needed serious platform-engineering capacity in India but was mid-scale, without the local entity, HR, or hiring infrastructure to stand up a centre from scratch — and didn’t want to lose a year building that before hiring a single engineer.
The risk with BOT is the transfer: teams built as someone else’s cost centre often wobble when they convert to the client’s own entity. The build had to be designed for the handover from the start.
What we did
We ran the operate phase as if it were already theirs. The 60-person platform team was hired to the client’s engineering bar and culture, not a generic vendor standard, so the people would still fit when the entity converted.
Everything was documented for transfer — hiring playbook, comp structure, team design — so the handover was an ownership change, not a rebuild.
- 01 Hiring to the client’s own engineering bar and culture from the first role.
- 02 A transfer-ready operating model: documented playbooks, comp, and org design.
- 03 Leadership hired early so the team had its own spine before the handover.
- 04 A staged transition plan mapped to the three-year BOT clock.
The outcome
The centre reached 60 platform engineers and transferred to the client’s own entity on schedule at the three-year mark, with the team and its leadership intact through the conversion.
What we’d flag to a similar client now: start the entity and compliance groundwork a full year before the transfer date, not six months. The people were ready; the paperwork is what compresses the timeline.
If a case like this looks like your problem, that's usually a sign.
Send us a brief or just describe what you're dealing with. We'll come back with one observation — even if we don't end up working together.