Dedicated Full Stack Engineers
Hire Full Stack Developers
One engineer who can take a feature from schema to screen.
For small teams, a genuine full stack engineer removes the hand-off tax. The catch is that most people advertised as full stack are strong on one side only.
Quick Answer
Updated August 22, 2026
What does it cost to hire a full stack developer?
A senior full stack developer from India costs $32–$45 per hour, about ₹3.5–5 lakh per month on a dedicated engagement. Full stack is the best-value seat for a team under about eight people, because a single engineer shipping a feature end to end avoids the coordination cost of splitting it. Past that team size, specialists usually deliver more per rupee.
Senior hourly rate
$32 – $45
Best team size
Under 8 engineers
Time to start
5 – 10 working days
Best for
- Early-stage products where one person owning a feature is fastest
- MVPs that need database, API, and interface moving together
- Small teams that cannot justify separate front-end and backend seats
Not best for
- Deep specialist work — heavy data, ML, or infrastructure
- Large teams where clear ownership boundaries matter more
- Products where one side of the stack dominates the workload
Rate Card
What does it cost to hire full stack developers?
Full stack prices at the standard web band. We are deliberately strict about who gets this label — an engineer who cannot design a schema is a front-end developer, and we price and place them as one.
| Level | Experience | Monthly (INR) | Hourly (USD) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | 3–5 years | ₹2,20,000 – ₹3,20,000 | $22 – $32 | Feature delivery inside an existing codebase and review structure |
| Senior | 5–8 years | ₹3,50,000 – ₹5,00,000 | $32 – $45 | Owning a module end to end, setting patterns, reviewing others |
| Lead / architect | 8+ years | ₹5,00,000 – ₹6,50,000 | $45 – $60 | Architecture, delivery sequencing, and technical accountability |
Rates are for dedicated engagements with at least four hours of daily overlap with your working hours. Longer commitments reduce the rate; more overlap increases it.
Capability
What our full stack developers actually do
- Data modelling and migrations, then the API, then the interface — in that order
- End-to-end TypeScript with types shared across the client and server boundary
- Authentication, authorisation, and session handling done once and done properly
- Deployment, environment configuration, and CI for the features they own
- Debugging across the whole request path instead of stopping at a boundary
- Knowing which side of the stack a problem actually lives on
Working stack
We staff for the stack you already run wherever we can. Where we think a different choice would serve you better, we will say so once — with the reasoning — and then work in yours.
Common Engagements
What teams usually hire full stack engineers for
MVP delivery
Taking a product from brief to a launched, usable version without a hand-off boundary in the middle of every feature.
Internal tools and admin surfaces
Operational tooling where the schema, the API, and the interface are all being invented at the same time.
Feature ownership inside a small team
Joining an existing product and owning a vertical slice — its data, its endpoints, and its screens.
Prototype to production
Taking something that works in a demo and adding the auth, error handling, and observability it needs to carry real users.
Vetting
How we decide who is good enough to place
Vetting is the entire value of hiring through an agency rather than a marketplace. If we are not rejecting most applicants, we are not doing the job you are paying for.
Step 1
Technical interview
A senior engineer from our team runs the interview. Not a recruiter with a checklist, and not an automated coding test.
Step 2
Practical exercise
A task close to the work you are actually hiring for, reviewed the way we would review a pull request.
Step 3
Reference and delivery check
We ask what they shipped recently, who reviewed it, and what went wrong on it. The last question is the useful one.
Step 4
Fit call with you
You speak to the engineer before committing. If the fit is wrong at that point, nothing has been signed.
Comparison
A real full stack engineer vs the label
"Full stack" is the most inflated title in the industry. Here is the standard we hold before we use it.
With SoftwareCrafting
- Can design a normalised schema and write the migration, unprompted
- Comfortable owning a feature from database through to interface
- Knows which side of the stack a bug is on before opening the debugger
- Placed as a specialist instead if they are strong on only one side
Typical alternative
- Front-end developer who has written a few CRUD endpoints
- Backend developer who can assemble a page from a component library
- Every performance problem blamed on the other half of the stack
- The label applied to whoever is available
Engagement Models
Four ways to work with us, and when each one fits
Dedicated seat
One engineer working full time inside your team, your repo, and your process. Monthly rolling, two weeks notice.
Ongoing roadmap work with no defined end date
Part-time seat
From roughly 20 hours a week. Below that, context reloading eats most of the value, and we will say so.
Specialist input alongside an existing team
Fixed-scope project
A defined deliverable at an agreed price. Only where scope is genuinely clear enough to fix without a change-request cycle.
Migrations, audits, and well-specified builds
Delivery pod
Three to four people including QA and a named delivery owner accountable for the sprint outcome.
Whole product areas you want owned end to end
What you get either way
- You interview the engineer before anything is signed
- Replacement at our cost if the fit is wrong in the first two weeks
- IP assignment and NDA signed before technical access is granted
- Code committed to your repository, under your organisation, from day one
- Monthly rolling contract — two weeks notice, no annual lock-in
Quick Brief
Start the conversation here
Tell us the role, the stack, and when you need someone. We will come back with availability and a rate.
Your Name
Work Email
What do you need help with?
Proof
Products we have shipped with full stack
CareerLyze — AI resume analysis platform
Next.js 15, React 19, and Google Gemini behind a resume scoring and career optimisation product.
Driftload — user app and website
Next.js web app plus React Native client with live Google Maps tracking.
Prime Cares — doctor dashboard
Next.js and Node.js dashboard with authentication and document verification for clinicians.
FAQ
Questions buyers ask before hiring full stack engineers
How much does it cost to hire a full stack developer in India?
Mid-level full stack developers cost $22–$32 per hour and seniors $32–$45 per hour, roughly ₹2.2–3.2 lakh and ₹3.5–5 lakh per month respectively on a full-time dedicated seat.
Is one full stack developer enough to build our product?
For an MVP, often yes. Past first launch you usually want a second engineer, mostly for review and continuity — a single-engineer product is a real business risk regardless of how good that engineer is.
What is the difference between full stack and MERN?
MERN names a specific stack — MongoDB, Express, React, Node. Full stack describes the scope of responsibility regardless of the technology. Most of our full stack engineers work in TypeScript across Next.js and Node with either PostgreSQL or MongoDB.
Can a full stack developer handle DevOps too?
Standard deployment, CI, and environment configuration, yes. Cost optimisation, multi-environment architecture, and compliance work need a DevOps specialist, and pretending otherwise is how infrastructure bills quietly triple.
When should we hire specialists instead?
Roughly once the engineering team passes eight people, or as soon as one side of the stack clearly dominates the work. Before that, specialists usually spend more time coordinating than building.
Do full stack developers write tests?
Yes, and it is in the rate. For full stack seats we weight integration tests over unit tests, because the bugs that matter in a vertical slice live at the boundaries.
Related services
The service pages behind this role
What this engineer works on day to day, and how we scope it commercially.