A few months ago, an engineer I will call Arjun sent me a connection request on LinkedIn. His opening message was direct: he was planning to move back to Pune, his H1B was running out, and he wanted to know if I could help him find a role with an Indian company. We get a lot of messages at TeemGenie, and job placements in India are not what we do, so I was about to reply with a polite redirect. Then I read his profile more carefully.
Arjun was a senior engineer with nearly a decade of US experience, a strong track record at a well-regarded product company, and a team in the US that relied on him considerably. He was planning to leave, but not because he was unhappy. He was planning to leave because he assumed it was his only option.
I wrote back and asked him one question before pointing him anywhere: had he spoken to his current employer about staying on after he moved?
He had not, and his reason was entirely understandable. Most engineers in his situation assume their US employer simply cannot keep them once they are no longer in the country. The visa ends, the work authorisation ends, and the employment ends with it. What most engineers do not know is that there is a legal structure that makes it possible to keep working for a US company from India, compliantly and without the engineer or the employer having to set up anything complex. That structure is called an Employer of Record, or EOR, and it is how Arjun eventually stayed employed at the same company he had been with for six years.
What an EOR Actually Does And What It Looks Like In Practice
Before getting into how Arjun's situation resolved, it helps to explain what an EOR is, because most engineers who reach out to us have heard the term without fully understanding the mechanics.
When a US company wants to keep an employee who is relocating to India, they face a structural problem: they have no legal entity in India, and paying someone there without one puts both the company and the employee in a non-compliant position. Setting up an Indian subsidiary takes months and involves ongoing administrative overhead that makes little sense for a single hire.
An EOR solves this by acting as the legal employer in India on the US company's behalf. TeemGenie handles the Indian employment contract, payroll, provident fund contributions, ESI registration, tax deductions, and gratuity obligations. The engineer continues doing the same work for the same US team, reporting to the same manager, and attending the same standups. The EOR is the compliance layer that makes the whole arrangement legal, and from the engineer's perspective, the day-to-day experience of the job is largely unchanged.
This is the part that surprises most engineers when I explain it to them. They expect a complicated restructuring of their role, a pay cut, or a change in reporting lines. In most cases, none of that happens.
The Call That Changed Things
Arjun had done his research by the time we spoke again, and he understood the concept. Where he needed help was in figuring out how to bring his US employer to the same conclusion he had already reached.
We talked through the approach together, and my first suggestion was to go directly to his manager rather than starting with HR. A manager's primary concern is delivery and retention, and if you arrive with a ready-made solution rather than an open-ended problem, the conversation moves faster and lands better.
Taking that approach, Arjun went to his manager and explained that he was planning to relocate, that he had found a compliant structure for continuing in the same role, and that he wanted to stay with the company. His manager agreed to loop in HR and explore what was possible.
That is when we got involved directly, joining a call with the company's VP of Engineering and their Head of People with no intention of pitching them on anything. We gave them a clear technical briefing: how Indian employment law works, what statutory compliance covers across provident fund, health insurance, tax withholding, and end-of-service gratuity, what the onboarding timeline would look like, and what their legal exposure would be if they kept Arjun on US payroll while he worked from Pune.
We also put a cost comparison in front of them: according to SHRM's human capital benchmarking data, replacing a senior engineer, accounting for recruiter fees, ramp time, and knowledge transfer loss, runs anywhere from $85,000 to over $200,000. The TeemGenie EOR fee for year one was a fraction of that figure, and once the comparison was in front of them, the decision became straightforward.
What Happened After
Arjun was onboarded in 17 days. His contract was issued, PF and ESI were registered, the payslip portal went live, and his laptop arrived at his home in Pune on day one. From his US team's perspective, nothing had changed: same Slack workspace, same standups, same sprint cycles.
Six months later, his company had used the TeemGenie infrastructure Arjun helped establish to hire two more engineers in India, at roughly 30 to 50 percent of the equivalent US cost depending on seniority and specialisation. A situation that started as a retention conversation had quietly become their India hiring strategy.
This is something EOR conversations rarely get to. An EOR is a compliance and payroll mechanism, of course, but in practice, it often serves as the first real infrastructure a US company builds in India.
Arjun did not message me on LinkedIn with a retention strategy in mind. He messaged me looking for a job in India as he had already assumed his current one was gone. Everything that followed happened because one conversation changed what he thought was possible.
What I Tell Engineers in His Situation
I speak with a lot of people who are where Arjun was: H1B engineers thinking about returning, people watching their parents age from a distance, professionals who have spent well over a decade in a green card queue and have started recalculating whether the timeline is worth it.
What I tell them tends to be consistent across those conversations.
Bring the solution, and you control the conversation. Walking into HR with "I am moving, what can we do?" puts the burden on them to figure things out. Walking in with a clear explanation of the legal structure, a cost comparison, and a provider they can call puts you in an entirely different position.
The numbers favour keeping you. Senior engineers are expensive to replace. Recruiter fees for technical roles typically run 15 to 20 per cent of annual salary, with engineering placements averaging around 23 per cent according to Top Echelon Network's industry benchmarking. When you factor in ramp-up time, onboarding hours, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door, the EOR cost in year one looks nothing by comparison.
You have support if you need it. When Arjun's employer wanted someone who could answer their compliance questions directly, TeemGenie joined that call. We do this regularly because an employer who understands what they are agreeing to makes the decision more quickly and with greater confidence. If your company has never heard of an EOR, we can walk them through it.
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If This Is Where You Are
The volume of these conversations has increased in 2026, and the reasons go beyond policy anxiety. India is a genuinely different destination for technical professionals than it was a decade ago. Nasscom's 2026 Strategic Review puts India's technology industry at $315 billion, more than double its size from ten years ago, with engineering R&D and global capability centres driving sustained growth. Senior engineers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune are working on serious product at competitive compensation, often within US time zone coverage.
Returning to India and continuing in your current role are no longer mutually exclusive, but that outcome requires someone to initiate the conversation, prepare the business case, and make it straightforward for a US company to say yes. In most cases, that person is the engineer.
If you are planning to move back to India and want help bringing your employer along, or if you are an employer who has received this kind of request and wants to understand the mechanics, talk to us. We have done this before.