Full Scale Lands on the Inc. 5000 for a Fifth Straight Year as Companies Keep Building Offshore Engineering Teams

The Kansas-based software staffing company has now made the list every year since 2022, a run that tracks a broader shift toward distributed engineering teams built in the Philippines.

Full Scale, a software staffing company based in Kansas, has been named to the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies for the fifth consecutive year. The company builds dedicated engineering teams for clients using developers based in the Philippines, and its latest appearance on the list extends a run that began in 2022.

Full Scale first landed on the Inc. 5000 at No. 878 nationally, driven by 723% revenue growth over three years. It has returned every year since: 2023, 2024, 2025, and now 2026, when it ranked No. 4,272. The company was also ranked No. 6 among businesses in Kansas and No. 78 in the Business Products and Services category during its debut year.

Five consecutive appearances on a list built around fast, sustained revenue growth is a meaningful signal on its own. It also lines up with a wider trend: more companies are treating offshore engineering capacity as a standing part of how they staff product teams, not a stopgap for slow quarters.

A Founder's Own Hiring Problem, Turned Into a Company

Full Scale was founded in 2018 by Matt Watson, a four-time technology founder whose earlier ventures include co-founding automotive software company VinSolutions and later founding application performance monitoring company Stackify. Across those companies, Watson ran into the same wall repeatedly: finding and keeping experienced software developers got harder every time his engineering needs grew.

That problem is what led Watson to the Philippines in 2018. Full Scale's operations there started as a way to recruit developers for his own technology ventures. Other founders in his network wanted access to the same talent pool, and what began as one company's hiring fix turned into a staffing business in its own right.

How the Model Differs From Typical Offshore Staffing

Full Scale's pitch rests on a specific structural choice: developers are Full Scale employees, not freelancers rotating across projects. Each one is assigned to a dedicated client team and works as an ongoing member of that team's engineering organization, rather than as outside help brought in for a single deliverable.

Full Scale manages employment, benefits, equipment, and the other operational overhead of running a workforce in the Philippines, so client companies get engineering capacity without also taking on the administrative load of employing people in another country. The company describes this as building dedicated offshore engineering teams rather than running a marketplace of contractors.

The numbers behind that model have grown alongside the Inc. 5000 streak. Full Scale now has more than 350 developers working from the Philippines and has supported more than 200 technology and product companies since it was founded. The company says it reviews more than 1,000 developer applications a month, with roughly 3% of applicants ultimately making it through its vetting process, and it reports developer retention above 93%.

Why the Growth Keeps Compounding

Watson has pointed to a connection between Full Scale's own growth and the growth of the companies it serves. Client businesses that need more engineering capacity, and don't want to hire that capacity entirely out of a competitive domestic labor market, tend to keep expanding their offshore teams instead of scaling them back. That retention dynamic, more than any single new-client wave, is what tends to compound a staffing company's growth year over year.

The rise of artificial intelligence tools inside software teams adds another layer to that demand. AI is changing how engineering teams work, but it has not reduced the need for experienced developers who can build, maintain, and ship products. If anything, teams adopting AI tooling still need people who understand the codebase well enough to use those tools effectively, which keeps demand for engineering talent, offshore or otherwise, on an upward path.

The Broader Shift Behind the Numbers

Full Scale's streak is also a useful marker for what has happened to offshore staffing more broadly since 2018. Early offshore engagements were often justified almost entirely on cost: a company needed cheaper developer hours, so it hired the lowest bidder it could find and hoped the work held up. Full Scale founder Matt Watson has a name for that pattern: cheapshoring. The bad outcomes it produced, missed deadlines and developers who cycled out mid-project among them, gave offshore staffing a reputation problem that took years to shake.

The staffing companies that have grown consistently since then tend to have moved away from that pitch. Retention, integration with an existing engineering culture, and continuity on a single team have become the metrics clients actually ask about before signing, ahead of the hourly rate. A staffing company that cannot keep its own developers past a year has little chance of giving a client a stable team, no matter how competitive its pricing looks on a proposal.

That shift in what clients evaluate is part of why a metric like 93% developer retention matters as much to Full Scale's growth story as its headcount does. Companies that have been burned once by a high-turnover offshore vendor tend to ask pointed questions about retention before they sign a second contract with anyone.

A Longer-Term Bet on Staffing Relationships

Full Scale has built its business around longer client and developer relationships rather than one-off placements. The company has earned Great Place to Work certification for two consecutive years, and in 2026 it ranked No. 15 among technology workplaces in Southeast Asia, a signal aimed as much at prospective developers as at clients.

Five straight years on the Inc. 5000 list puts Full Scale in a small group of companies that have sustained fast growth long enough for it to look less like a spike and more like a pattern. For a staffing company, that kind of consistency is itself a credential: it suggests client teams are staying, developers are staying, and the model is holding up as the company scales.

About Full Scale

Full Scale is a Kansas-based software staffing company founded in 2018 by four-time technology founder Matt Watson. The company builds dedicated offshore engineering teams through its workforce in the Philippines, helping businesses expand their software development capabilities. Full Scale has more than 350 developers and has supported more than 200 companies since its founding. More information is available at fullscale.io.