How to hire engineers in India from Europe: the full guide

There are two ways to put an engineer in India on a compliant footing.

The first is to set up your own Indian entity. You register a private limited company, open local banking, appoint a resident director, and register for provident fund, professional tax, and the rest of the statutory framework. It gives you a permanent presence, and it takes months of legal and accounting work before your first hire signs anything.

The second is an Employer of Record. Your engineer is employed through an established India entity, so they are on a fully statutory footing from their first day while they stay unmistakably your team. You skip the registration project and start hiring this week.

Why an EOR gets your engineer working sooner

The entity route front-loads the slow part. The EOR route has already done it. With Cyphertree, your team is employed through an established entity in Pune, so the months of company formation are behind you before you begin. Onboarding completes within 24 hours of a signed offer, and an existing India team can be moved onto the platform in minutes with their pay, leave, and statutory records carried over intact.

Once you choose the EOR route, the path from decision to a working engineer is short and mostly self-service, with assistance on demand.

1. Set yourself up

You get an invite, enter your company details through the portal, and your SLA is generated for both sides to sign. Every signature is an Advanced Electronic Signature under eIDAS and India's IT Act, timestamped and recorded in an audit trail, so you are legally protected across Europe and India from the moment you are set up.

2. Send a compliant offer

You roll out offers from ready-made templates, or Cyphertree drafts one for you. The offer is a proper Indian employment contract with the CTC and its components resolved for you. Employee or contractor, each offer is signed in the same legally protected envelope, so the compliance is built into the signature rather than bolted on after.

3. Onboard your engineer

Once your hire signs, they are guided through onboarding step by step: acknowledging your company policies, submitting their statutory and tax details, and confirming their previous employment, all verified before they start. You set your own policies for shift, attendance, leave, and performance in about five minutes with smart defaults. They join properly, fully covered, and ready from day one.

4. Run the first payroll

Payroll runs on an own-built engine, CTpay, validated against a CA-approved prototype. Your team is paid by the last day of every month, and the statutory pieces are computed and filed on schedule alongside it: provident fund, TDS, professional tax, and gratuity, in the exact filing formats. The invoice is raised on the 21st, and it is one line: salary plus the platform subscription.

India labour law is built into the platform rather than left to you to track. Statutory leave minimums, maternity at 182 days, paternity at 15 days, notice-period resolution, and encashment formulas are enforced by the system. On the payroll side, provident fund, ESI, TDS across the new and old regimes with marginal relief, professional tax across states, and labour welfare fund are all computed and exported for filing.

Data protection runs on both sides of the relationship. Candidate scoring during hiring is consent-gated under GDPR Article 6(1)(a) and India's DPDP Act, and a candidate can withdraw that consent, at which point the AI ranking is hidden at once. Your team's data sits behind per-tenant isolation at the database level.

Both are proper hires on the same platform, signed in the same legally protected envelope. A full-time employee carries the statutory employer math and required medical cover. A contractor is lighter: they invoice you for their own pay, so there is no salary or statutory employer calculation, and medical insurance becomes optional rather than required. The work the platform does is the same either way, which is why the subscription is the same for both.

The shape is deliberately simple. EOR employment is a flat €250 per person each month, a subscription with full access to all modules, which works out to €3,000 a year per seat. The monthly invoice is salary plus that subscription. Insurance is billed once a year. One-time fees cover equipment at cost and, only if Cyphertree sources the hire, a recruitment fee of 10% of base CTC charged once at hire. If you bring your own candidate, that fee does not apply.

For your exact figure, the cost calculator takes a CTC and returns a full annual number broken into monthly, annual, and one-time, in about a minute.

To see the journey running on your own numbers, read how it works, check the open costs on pricing, or book a 20-minute demo and walk it through for your situation.