Founder-led. Remote-first. Senior bench.
Hontec is a remote-first studio headquartered in Vadodara. The founders, Jagdish Parmar and Shubham Raiyani, work alongside a hand-picked freelance bench of senior engineers, designers and product folk. We make a small number of promises on every engagement, and we ship them.
Started in Vadodara, built remote-first by engineers tired of vendor theatre.
Jagdish Parmar and Shubham Raiyani spent their first decade in industry on opposite sides of the same problem — Jagdish on the product and engineering management side, Shubham deep in systems and architecture. They kept comparing notes on what was wrong with the software their employers were buying.
The pattern they kept finding: the people on the pitch were not the people on the project. The CV bench was a marketing artefact. The codebase by month six was a stranger’s. They thought there was room for a firm that ran services the way product companies run engineering — senior bench, high tenure, the engineer in the standup is the engineer in the codebase.
So they started Hontec in Vadodara, remote-first from day one. The product line grew from there — Flow, Vault and Lens for operations, compliance and finance teams, and Pharmacare for India’s pharma supply chain — each built after they kept seeing the same problems show up in engagement after engagement. They built their own answers, sold them, and used the revenue to fund longer engineering bets and a senior bench other firms can’t.
A short list of opinions we’ve been willing to lose deals over.
The engineer is the proposal.
If we can’t name and staff the principals on a deck, we walk away from it. The CV bench is not a marketing artefact.
Boring tech, picked on purpose.
We’ve had the latest-and-greatest era. We pick stacks our clients can hire for in five years and we say no to ones we don’t love.
Security taken seriously, honestly.
DPAs, BAAs, NDAs and customer-managed keys are part of every SOW. We’re upfront about where we are on SOC 2 and ISO 27001 — we’ll show you our current posture, not pretend to a certification we don’t have.
Transition out by default.
Every engagement has a written transition-out plan and a hire-out schedule for our engineers. We’d rather you take it in-house in year two than resent us in year three.
We’ll talk you out of work we don’t love.
Most of our best client relationships started with a ‘don’t build this’ in week two of discovery.
Product company discipline, services-firm flexibility.
The same people who designed our product line are on your team. The same engineers fix Lens bugs at midnight and your release at 5pm.
A small founder-led core, and a senior freelance bench around it.
Hontec is run by its founders, and one of them is on every engagement of consequence. Around them is a hand-picked bench of senior freelance engineers, designers and product folk we’ve worked with for years — staffed only when their CV fits the brief.
Jagdish Parmar
Jagdish runs the product line and the commercial side of the firm. He’s the person you’ll meet first, and the person who’ll still be on your QBR three years in. He believes the proposal is only as good as the engineer it names.
Shubham Raiyani
Shubham runs engineering and architecture. He sets the technical bar for the bench, leads the toughest design reviews, and is the second escalation when something goes sideways at 2am. Distributed systems by trade, opinionated about boring tech for honest reasons.
Senior freelancers we’ve worked with for years.
Around the founders is a curated, remote network of independent senior engineers and designers. We staff only the people whose CV would convince you if you were hiring. No graduates billed at senior rates, no ‘resource pool’ with a different name on the standup each month.
- Hand-picked per engagement, named on the SOW.
- Same people from kickoff to handover, or you don’t pay for the swap.
- Distributed across time zones for client overlap.
Few, specific, and we keep them.
We don’t hide behind methodology. Every engagement carries a small number of named, dated commitments and we deliver on them — or we credit your invoice.
- Reply within 2 working days, every time.
- A named senior on the call, not an account manager.
- Production-grade slice within the milestone you signed.
- Code, infra, docs handed over — yours from day one.
Have a problem worth solving? Bring it.
Tell us what you're trying to ship. We'll come back inside two working days with people, a plan, or both.