• the engineer in Bengaluru hired by a start-up in Austin that has no company registered in India
• the contractor in Manila
• the employee moving to another country, whose visa has to be filed before they can start

Say you are that engineer in Bengaluru. The start-up in Austin wants to hire you. But to employ you in India, it would normally need its own registered company in India, called a legal entity, with its own payroll, tax filings and compliance. Setting that up for one engineer would take months.

The industry that made this routine started only in the mid-2010s. Its main product is the employer of record, or EOR. An employer of record is a company that legally employs your worker in a country where you cannot. It runs the payroll, the benefits and the compliance there for you. It turned hiring someone abroad from a legal project into a monthly subscription. It grew fastest in the years when companies discovered they could hire anywhere.

Beside it sits an older business: immigration case management. This is the software through which a large employer files and tracks the work permits of thousands of staff.

The buyers are companies that hire across borders. This Market Segment has six small companies, and four of them are Indian-founded. That fits, because India is the country the world most often hires from across a border.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.