How and Why to Hire Offshore Data Scientists in 2025

Data Science, a field at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and computer science, has revolutionized the way businesses make decisions by extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of data.

Data scientists are in high demand because they play a crucial role in helping companies maintain a competitive edge by enabling these data-driven choices and fostering innovation.

Companies often reach out to Mobilunity in search of remote big data experts, and we’d love to share why they go offshore and how we help them.

In this article, we’ll explore the pros and cons of hiring with vendors and give you proven techniques for aligning distributed teams.

You’ll also discover the remunerations of Data Science experts in popular offshore locations and gain insights on how to select a reliable tech talent provider.

Who Are Offshore Data Scientists?

Remote data specialists are Data Science talent who work outside the hiring company’s location. Offshoring typically assumes significant regional time differences with your remote tech team. The nearshoring model lets businesses engage data experts from neighboring countries. 

Data scientists generate data interpretations with methods like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and others.

Learn more about the methods our Data Science developers use. 

Here are three core formats of cooperation with remote Data Science developers:

• Freelancers. Companies contract freelance off-site Data Science experts, outlining the scope of work, intellectual property rights, secure data transfer channels, and milestone-based payment schedules. However, this format brings risks of inconsistent availability, lack of long-term commitment, and confidentiality concerns.  
• Tech experts providers. These are professional companies that quickly recruit and retain skilled data scientists with proven track records. They cover candidate vetting, contracting, and retaining as well as handling sensitive data, payments, and administrative support. Vendors assemble teams and typically pass operational control over them to clients.
• Outsourcing Data Science firms. Data Science outsourcing involves delegating entire projects to third-party service providers. These companies have a pool of Data Science developers with specialized skills available for diverse tasks. These teams remain under your partner’s control and deliver turnkey solutions. 

Cooperation with freelancers can be uncertain and inconsistent, while outsourcing can provide limited access to your engineers and be costly.

Contracting offshore AI experts with providers appears to be an effective solution for small, medium-sized, and large businesses.

Benefits and Challenges of Contracting Offshore Data Science Developers With Vendors

Let’s explore the benefits and possible issues of engaging remote developers through providers.

Pros

Below, we highlight the key benefits of collaboration with providers of offshore data specialists.

1. Cost-efficiency

With vendors, you can contract developers from countries with low living costs and low tax jurisdictions. This can reduce the cost of maintaining an offshore tech team by up to 50% compared to hiring in-house Data Science engineers.

2. Access to a global tech talent pool

Outsourcing Data Science engineers’ provision to vendors lets you engage specialists with rare skills that can be scarce or too costly to recruit locally. Companies leverage the right expertise, advanced tech capabilities, and innovative perspectives.

3. Team scalability

When delegating recruiting and retention to vendors, businesses can swiftly scale their teams up or down based on project requirements. This adaptability is ideal for dynamic demands like rapid expansion changes or downsizing.

4. Focus on strategic goals

Traditionally, vendors offer administrative support for the developers they provide. It includes accounting, legal, HR services, and IT infrastructure and allows on-site employees to focus on business growth, innovation, and strategic objectives.

5. Continuous development cycle

While time differences with offshore destinations can be significant, they let organizations get more working hours a day. This speeds up delivery timelines and ensures faster go-to-market time, maintaining consistent productivity.

Challenges

While contracting remote Data Science developers through agents brings benefits, it can also present the following challenges:

 1. Need for more control

Due to distance and time zone differences, managers have limited supervision over their teams. It may result in delays, misaligned priorities, or quality inconsistencies. So, PMs must have transparent processes and use practical tools to monitor projects’ progress and outcomes with the vendor’s assistance.

2. Language and cultural differences

From accents and direct translations to hierarchy perceptions and deadline treatment, cross-cultural differences can affect collaboration and decision-making in distributed teams. However, a professional vendor will vet programmers with English proficiency and high work ethic standards to avoid potential communication issues.

3. Data security risks

Sharing sensitive data with offshore teams increases the risk of illegal access, privacy violations, and non-observance of data security guidelines. A reliable provider, though, will ensure safe data exchange, adherence to confidentiality agreements, and alignment with global standards like GDPR or HIPAA to mitigate these risks.

4. Integration challenges 

Differences in workflows, tools, and communication practices, as well as process misalignment, can hinder the productivity of a remote development team. Nonetheless, an experienced vendor has proven approaches that speed up the onboarding of new team members, streamline their coordination, and keep them motivated.

Best Practices of Integration of Offshore Developers With In-House Employees

As a dedicated tech team provider with over a decade of experience, we can confirm that contracting the right offshore talent is only a part of your success. We recommend fostering interaction in distributed teams to build a cohesive environment where collaboration strives.

These proven techniques will help you with integrating offshore teams with on-site professionals, facilitating effective collaboration, and overcoming common challenges that off-site and distributed squads face.

Onboard Your Qualified Data Scientists

Provide newcomers access to software, repositories, communication, and collaboration platforms. Share detailed project documentation, coding standards, company policies, and workflows, and engage the existing specialists to distribute the tribal knowledge.

Introduce team members, describing their roles, responsibilities, cooperation flow, and performance metrics. Explain your company’s values, mission, and work culture and show how their work fits into your business’s objectives. Ensure they sign your NDA and IP agreements.

Walk Data Science engineers through CI/CD pipelines, project-specific tools, and internal systems. Assign the first small, manageable tasks and pair them with developers for assistance and guidance during the first weeks.

Establish Effective Communication

It’s crucial to encourage transparent and result-oriented collaboration, so schedule regular check-ins and define preferred communication tools for quick questions (Slack), daily updates, and detailed discussions (Google Meet, Zoom).

Use project management tools like Asana or Trello to track milestones and tasks and create a supportive atmosphere for sharing concerns, asking questions, or expressing ideas.

Promote interaction between the remote and in-house teams and create a cohesive environment, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Ensure Ongoing Talent Retention

Continuous retention is essential for building long-term relationships with your developers to maintain your team consistency, and this process has many aspects.

Start with equipping your data specialists with an advanced tech stack, establishing clear project workflows and milestones, and outlining expectations for the deliverables.

Run regular one-on-ones to assess your engineers’ motivation and spot potential dissatisfactions. Initiate feedback sessions and performance reviews to discuss achievements and improvements.

Create an atmosphere of unity with like-minded people with whom team members can talk and have fun.

Explore how Mobilunity helped Zenchef, a leading French online restaurant reservation platform, to extend its development team and ensure its stability due to effective integration. 

Cost of Contracting Offshore Data Science Engineers in Different Countries

Below are the average annual salaries of data scientists in the US, UK, EU, and several top onshore and offshore destinations (Glassdoor, DOU).

As you can see from the table, engaging developers from Eastern Europe, LATAM, and Asia is, on average, 50%-70% more cost-effective than contracting them in the US, UK, or Western Europe. Let’s discover what impacts this difference.

Factors Influencing Data Scientists’ Compensation

Below are the parameters that affect the remuneration of Data Science engineers.

• Location: Data specialists based in regions with higher living costs, such as the US and EU, earn higher salaries than those in lower-cost-of-living areas like Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
• Experience: Data engineers with 3-4 years of experience earn 15-25% higher salaries than their junior colleagues, while senior developers get, on average, 40% more than data analysts with one year of experience.
• Industry: US data specialists in management & consulting and finance earn around 25% more than those engaged in pharmaceutical or legal projects. 
• Skills and certifications: Data Science experts certified by Google, Microsoft, IBM, DASCA (Data Science Council of America), Amazon, SAS Institute, etc., and expertise in diverse technologies can secure higher pay.

How to Choose the Right Partner for Contracting Remote Data Science Experts

This section outlines key steps that help you select an experienced, reliable, and client-focused provider of Data Science engineers.

1. Select the location of your future team

Consider regions known for skilled data scientists, such as Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. Think of the working hours compatibility, English proficiency, and cultural alignment.

2. Research companies that provide talent in your country of interest

Identify reputable companies that provide developers in your preferred region using industry directories like Clutch and GoodFirms, online platforms like Upwork, Toptal, and LinkedIn, and your professional network.

3. Evaluate vendors’ expertise in providing Data Science experts

Review your potential vendors’ AI, ML, and big data project portfolios, exploring case studies that prove their expertise in acquiring data scientists. Ask for clients’ contacts to learn the details first-hand.

4. Check collaboration conditions and scalability

Ensure your future partner’s cooperation model (part-, full-time, or hourly engagement) aligns with your business goals and preferences. These include budget, reporting frequency and format, onboarding, talent retention, and flexibility.

5. Confirm adherence to data security standards and confidentiality

Verify compliance with global information safety regulations, availability of secure communication channels, encrypted information-sharing protocols, and robust access controls. Check their confidentiality policies, including NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).

6. Compare pricing structures and select your future partner

Ask for a one-page summary of your potential partner’s agreement to analyze rates and cost composition. Consider long-term benefits like onboarding, talent retention, and resource flexibility, and select the agency that fits your goals best.

Mobilunity as a Reliable Offshore Partner

Mobilunity stands as a trusted offshore partner due to its 10+ years of experience in acquiring tech talent, 1,000+ professionals contracted, and 150+ successful projects in 20+ countries.

We offer two distinct collaboration plans to meet diverse project needs:

Services Provided by Data Scientists We Help You Hire

Here’s how our experts can contribute to your operational excellence.

• Data gathering and preprocessing. Our Data Science experts for hire will help you excel in collecting and preprocessing data, making it structured and ready for analysis. This step involves data cleaning, feature engineering, handling missing values, setting up data pipelines, audio, text and video data annotation, and more. 
• Algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning. The developers we provide have deep expertise in ML algorithms and proficiency in fine-tuning learning rates, tree depth, and other parameters. They’ll help you select the configurations that suit your problem type and desired outcomes, ensuring higher prediction accuracy and efficiency.
• Model training and validation. Hire data scientists with us to leverage their deep expertise in training your ML models. By adhering to best practices and employing advanced validation techniques, they ensure your model’s accuracy, precision, and recall meet your expectations.
• Model evaluation. After developing a model, the offshore AI developers you contract will rigorously evaluate its performance. Using cross-validation, error analysis, and performance metrics, they’ll ensure the model meets your specific criteria and delivers accurate and reliable results.
• Consultancy. We provide expert consultants who’ll help you handle the complexities of Data Science. Whether you need guidance on data strategy, technology adoption, or problem-solving, we’ll assist you in acquiring advisors who’ll provide invaluable insights and recommendations.

Possible Offshore Development Data Science Team Setups

Mobilunity offers flexible cooperation models that allow you to engage developers and consultants for as many hours as needed.

Such an approach is equally beneficial for projects demanding dedicated dev teams and smaller assignments that don’t require full-time involvement of, for instance, Project Managers or DevOps specialists.

Whether you plan for Data Science outsourcing, hiring remote offshore Node.js developers, or onboarding a remote UI/UX Designer, we can help. 

Mobilunity’s adaptability lets clients optimize their off-site tech resources and align their offshore development teams with project scopes and budgets.

Below are three approximate data processing team structures according to their sizes and role descriptions of their members.

• Project Manager is responsible for task coordination, communication inside the team and with shareholders, and keeping the project on track.
• Senior Developer accomplishes complex coding tasks, designs and reviews architecture, and provides technical guidance to the team.
• Lead Developer writes high-quality code and oversees the development team, providing mentorship and technical direction. 
• Mid-Level Developer is an expert in data analysis, machine learning, insights extraction, and deployment models into production. 
• UI/UX Designer creates intuitive and engaging interfaces and ensures uninterrupted user experiences, balancing user and business needs.
• Database Administrator manages the database infrastructure for efficient file storage, retrieval, user access, and data security. 
• QA Specialist focuses on quality assurance and testing to ensure the product meets stringent data quality and privacy compliance standards.

Wrapping Up

Businesses need to implement big data analytics to remain market-relevant. Meanwhile, US and EU-based Data Science experts are often in high demand and expect competitive compensations.

Partnering with a reliable provider to find, onboard, and retain offshore data scientists is a strategic choice that allows businesses to optimize costs for driving better decision-making, boosting innovation, and revealing market opportunities.

Vendors will help you find and onboard required niche-skilled professionals, cover their administrative support, and keep them motivated to ensure your long-term collaboration.

Written by:

Kristina Stepanova

Market Researcher

Disclaimer: All salaries and prices mentioned within the article are approximate numbers based on the research done by our in-house Marketing Research Team. Please use these numbers as a reference for comparison only. Feel free to use the contact form to inquire on the specific cost of the talent according to your vacancy requirements and chosen model of engagement.