Frequently Asked Questions
Everything teams ask us before the kickoff. How we approach work, what each engagement model actually brings, what happens when scope moves, and what profiles are we looking for.
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Engagement models
How we structure, price, and end a piece of work, before we get to the work itself.
We work on time&material and fixed price engagements. With time & material you pay a monthly rate per engineer billed at the amount of working hours that were executed. With fixed price we agree the scope and the number up front, then deliver it against milestones.
Staff augmentation and Team as a Service are always time & material, because what you're buying is capacity that you control. Consulting engagements and end-to-end product builds can go either way. Discovery work is often fixed price even when the build that follows isn't.
Each engineer has an hourly rate, our teams act as a part of your own, and you prioritize the initiatives they work on, the same way you'd direct someone you hired yourself. We invoice monthly for the time actually delivered, so you only pay for the raw executed hours and not for holidays or sick leaves.
When predictability matters more than flexibility. If you're working against an approved budget, need sign-off from a board or a procurement team, or just want to know the total before you start, fixed price gives you one number and a delivery date.
We structure it as milestones. The scope is broken into defined deliverables, each with acceptance criteria and a payment tied to it, so you see working software along the way instead of one reveal at the end, and you never pay ahead of what's been delivered. The trade is that scope changes go through a change request, which for some projects is the discipline they needed anyway.
Yes, and it's a common pattern. A fixed-price discovery or architecture sprint establishes what's actually being built and what it will take, then the build itself runs on time & material once the big unknowns are settled.
It works the other way too. Teams already on time & material sometimes carve out a well-understood workstream, like a migration, an integration, or a compliance deliverable, and fix the price on that piece while the rest of the engagement carries on as it was.
You do, fully, from day one. Source code, models, prompts, documentation, and infrastructure configuration produced under an engagement are all your property. We don't licence anything back to you and we don't retain components of our own.
Wherever possible we work in your repositories and your cloud accounts, so ownership comes down to where the work already lives rather than a clause you have to enforce later.
Long-term engagements start with a two-week free trial. It's real work and there's no invoice at the end of it. After that, staff augmentation and Team as a Service run on rolling monthly terms with 30 days' notice, so you're never tied to a year to find out whether we're any good.
Consulting engagements and fixed-price projects end when the scope does. We invoice monthly in arrears, net 15, in EUR or USD.
Consulting engagements
For teams that need direction and prioritization on how to move with AI.
Depends who we're going against. We don't know much about them, so here's what we know about ourselves:
We've been AI-native from 2024.
Our teams understand AI from the inside, and not in terms of theory, but as the thing they build with and inside of every day, and that's a completely different starting point from a firm that just formed an AI department.
We've run AI engagements with over 40 companies, and a lot of them look like yours: same stack, same procurement process, and same integration constraints. So we're not discovering your problem on your budget. We already know which approaches hold up in production and which ones look great in a POC but quietly fall apart in month two.
You're not paying us to learn. You're paying us to skip the part where we learn.
Typical consulting engagements run between 2-6 weeks depending on scope, after which you receive a guided implementation plan.
Both. The engagement can stop at a strategy and roadmap, or our engineers can embed with your team and ship the recommendations directly on your products and systems.
No. Part of the audit is assessing exactly what you have and what's missing, and the roadmap accounts for any data or infrastructure groundwork before it recommends anything on top.
Yes. Every engagement runs under clear guardrails for data, access, and model use, compliant with HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 or ISO standards, so you can adopt AI fast without exposing the business.
Consulting engagements are hard to price at a fixed rate, as every organization is different, and requires a unique approach to the problem you are trying to solve.
This is why we charge AI consulting engagements on a time & material basis, where you only pay for the amount of hours our team puts in.
For a typical team of 2 consultants the weekly price ranges from €4500-5700/week depending on seniority mix, and engagements typically run from 2-6 weeks, depending on the engagement scope.
Staff augmentation
Engineers who join your team, work under your direction, and inside your processes.
Our engineers onboard in under 4 weeks, but in most cases we are able to form a highly performing team in 2 weeks. Long-term engagements open with a 2-week free trial so you can see the fit before you commit for the long term.
Yes. You can either choose to run a full interview cycle as you would normally, or you can move forward with a trial engagement and let our team prove itself in production. Either way, you stay in control of who joins your team.
The only difference is that you're directly connected to our vetted talent pool, instead of sourcing from the open market.
It's the alternative to running a full interview cycle. We start with an intro call so you meet the engineer and they meet you, and you both get a feel for whether this is a fit.
If the vibe is right, we move into a 2-week onboarding period where our engineer works inside your department and you see them in action. Give them a PoC to build, or put them straight onto the real system, whichever tells you more. Either way you find out how they handle your workload and how they work inside your processes before you commit to anything long-term. If you're not satisfied with the delivery and don't see the potential of future collaboration, you don't pay. If you'd like to continue working with our engineer, the 2 weeks that passed are on a 15% discounted price.
Every single engineer we hire in Nortik needs to pass a comprehensive screening process. As we only hire 2% of our applicants, our team is constructed from people with over 7 years of experience, and who speak English as their native language.
Long-term engagements start with a 2-week free trials so you can de-risk your hires and raise early flags if something doesn't sit right. If the match isn't right, you walk away owing nothing, and we offer a replacement in under a week.
You do, fully. Everything is produced under an engagement so you own 100% of the code, documentation, and infrastructure configuration our engineers implement. No licenses, no lock-in.
Our staff augmentation offer assumes that you already have a team in place and need a ramp up to help you deliver. If you need a fully dedicated and autonomous delivery team, feel free to visit our Team as a Service page, as it might be more suited to your needs.
Team as a Service
A self-managed team that owns a workstream end to end, with its own lead and its own process.
Staff augmentation places individual senior engineers into your team, under your management. A dedicated team is a complete, self-managed unit of engineers, architects, and a delivery lead that owns execution end to end.
You set the direction and priorities; our team runs the delivery, the quality, and the day-to-day itself.
A dedicated delivery lead from our side runs the team's standups, planning, and quality bar, and stays your single point of contact. You steer the roadmap; we own how it gets built.
We scope, design, and stand up a fully onboarded team in weeks, not the months an internal build takes. Typically we need around 2 weeks to construct the team.
Yes. The team flexes with your roadmap: add capacity ahead of a peak-season quarter, or scale back once a milestone is completed. You're never carrying idle headcount.
You do, fully. Everything produced under the engagement (code, documentation, infrastructure) is your property from day one. No licenses, no lock-in.
Careers at Nortik
What it's like to work here, and how to get in, if you're reading this page from the other side.
Our team is based in Novi Sad, but we engage in a hybrid work environments. We support both fully remote work, but you're always welcome to come to the office! It's where the team hangs out and learns from each other.
An intro call, a technical conversation about systems you've actually built, a practical exercise close to the work you'd be doing, and a final call with the founders. Four steps, usually inside two weeks.
There are no whiteboard algorithms and no take-home that eats your weekend. We'd rather see how you reason about a real trade-off than watch you invert a binary tree.
We're big on learning. Whether it's mentoring, new tech, or tackling bigger responsibilities, we'll support you. If there's a course, conference, or workshop that helps you level up, we're all for it.
Skills matter, but so do attitude and mindset. We look for problem-solvers and go-getters. People who take ownership, communicate well, think independently, and work well with others. We also value curiosity, people who enjoy figuring things out.
It depends, but typically 1-3 weeks. We move fast, but we also take the time to find the right fit. If things are taking longer, we'll keep you posted.
Yes. We hire ahead of postings more often than we publish them, and a specific note about what you've built and what you want to work on next will land better than an application form.
Write to us through the careers page and include something we can look at, like a repo, a system you designed, or a write-up. We read all of them.