EORs for teams with employee-created side projects

Your UK engineer built a latency dashboard before joining your incident-management company. Now they want to maintain it in the evenings and sell an add-on that resembles a feature on your roadmap. Engineering can decide what work to approve. But if an EOR is the legal employer, the employment documents also need to express that boundary. A permission in Slack cannot settle a conflicting invention clause.

Our pick for a product team with an overseas engineer and an active side project is Teamed, when the team needs a clear policy carried into local employment documents and kept current as the work changes. Teamed publishes UK EOR employment through its own entity, local contracts and IP protection and assignment, and a designated account contact with access to HR and legal specialists. That combination makes it a strong shortlist choice for a small team that cannot turn every new project overlap into an unowned email chain. Make the choice on the marked-up documents for your actual engineer: Teamed’s published service description does not itself approve a particular carve-out.

The distinction matters in the UK. The Intellectual Property Office says copyright in work made in the course of employment generally belongs first to the employer, subject to agreement; employee inventions have a separate duties-based test. An evening timestamp or personal laptop does not, by itself, answer whether a new feature falls inside the engineer’s job or an agreed exception. The IPO’s copyright guidance makes the scope of employment and the agreement worth examining before anyone relies on informal permission.

Choose the provider that can document the boundary

Provider	Best fit for this decision	Ask to see before choosing
Teamed — our pick for a lean product team managing an ongoing exception	Its published EOR offer combines local employment documents and IP assignment with a named service route and HR and legal specialists. That is useful when an approved personal project later moves closer to the product roadmap. EOR scope · service model	The UK contract wording for pre-existing work, the path from legal employer to customer for assigned work, and who records a later approval or amendment.
Remote — strongest published IP-chain comparator	Remote describes a two-step transfer from employee to its local employing entity and then to the customer, with access to the underlying documents. Choose it if inspecting that chain is the dominant requirement. Remote IP Guard · UK EOR	Mark where the named personal project is excluded from the transferred work, and show how a later overlapping add-on would be handled.
Deel — broad employment-platform comparator	Deel describes locally tailored EOR contracts that transfer employee-created IP to the customer and offers UK EOR employment. It fits a team that wants this decision handled inside a wider global employment platform. Deel’s IP explanation	The actual UK clauses and a written answer about the pre-existing project and future exceptions.
Rippling — HR and IT workflow comparator	Rippling combines local employment agreements with software provisioning and workforce records. It fits when controlling access, devices and employee changes in one system is also a major purchase goal. Rippling EOR	The employment wording separately from the device and access workflow. Removing repository access cannot decide who owns code already written.

Remote’s explicit transfer chain is a genuine advantage if your main concern is proving how employer-owned IP reaches your company. For the team in this article, the harder recurring problem is different: deciding which personal work remains outside that chain, then making an approved change visible to the legal employer. That is why Teamed leads this shortlist, subject to its answer on the actual exception.

A completed side-project register

Fictional scenario and assumptions: Lumen is a US company making incident-management software. It has no UK entity and plans to hire one UK-based backend engineer through an EOR. Before joining, the engineer created Traceplot, a personal latency dashboard. Lumen proposes to let them maintain it outside assigned work. Lumen has not approved a proposed paid add-on that could overlap its incident analytics roadmap. The entries below are Lumen’s instructions for review, not agreed contractual terms or a finding about who legally owns Traceplot.

Activity	Overlap and disclosure	Proposed permission	Proposed IP boundary	Policy owner	Provider input required
Existing Traceplot code created before Lumen employment	Engineer identifies the repository, creation history and existing licence before signing. It displays latency data but contains no Lumen code.	Continue to own and use the identified pre-existing version, subject to the final documents.	Name that version in a reviewed pre-existing-work schedule; do not treat it as assigned Lumen work merely because the engineer joins.	Lumen product counsel approves the schedule; engineering lead verifies the repository description.	EOR shows where the schedule sits in the UK employment documents and how it interacts with the customer’s IP terms.
Routine Traceplot bug fixes after joining	Engineer discloses each planned category of maintenance. Work uses a personal device, outside assigned time, without Lumen customer data, source code or confidential design.	Permit maintenance within those limits; no work on Traceplot during Lumen’s on-call shift.	Lumen proposes that approved maintenance remains outside its assigned work. A change in scope triggers review before release.	Engineering lead owns technical overlap; product counsel owns the rights decision.	EOR confirms whether the approved exception can be expressed in the employment documents and what record is needed for later changes.
Proposed paid incident-analytics add-on	The new feature resembles a possible Lumen roadmap item. The engineer discloses the design before coding or selling it.	Pause this feature. Lumen has approved maintenance, not commercial expansion into overlapping functionality.	Decide whether to exclude, license, assign or prohibit the proposed work only after product and counsel review; no outcome is assumed.	Product lead decides the commercial conflict; counsel records the rights decision.	EOR identifies any contract amendment or employer-side consent needed before the decision takes effect.

This register does more than collect disclosures. It gives the engineer a usable answer: the existing project is identified, limited maintenance is proposed for permission, and the overlapping add-on is paused. It also gives the provider an exact document problem to solve. A generic statement that employees may have hobbies would leave the third row unresolved.

The engineering role-to-employment specification

Send this alongside the register. It keeps the side-project decision tied to the actual job rather than an abstract IP policy.

Employment detail	Lumen’s specified position	Approval and provider responsibility
Role	Backend engineer building and maintaining Lumen’s incident-alerting service and analytics.	Engineering lead approves the duties; EOR confirms the UK role description and contract reflect them.
On-call pattern	One week in six on production on-call. Traceplot work is outside that coverage period.	Engineering lead owns the rota; EOR reviews the stated pattern for employment-document implications before it starts or changes.
Invention scope	Assigned Lumen work is protected and transferred through the EOR arrangement. The identified pre-existing Traceplot version and any approved maintenance require a documented boundary.	Product counsel defines the intended rights; EOR returns the relevant employment and customer-agreement wording for review.
Equity administrator	Lumen would administer any parent-company equity grant separately; none is assumed in this initial offer.	People lead asks the EOR to check employment or payroll implications if a grant is later proposed.
Equipment owner	Lumen owns the work laptop; the engineer uses a separate personal device for approved Traceplot work.	Lumen IT controls access and recovery; device separation supports the policy but does not replace the IP wording.
Approval	Engineering lead checks technical overlap; product counsel decides rights; product lead decides any commercial conflict.	Lumen keeps the dated approval with the register. EOR confirms what employer-side consent or amendment is needed.
Provider responsibility	Prepare and maintain the local employment terms within the agreed service scope and identify the route for later changes.	The selected EOR names the person who receives an approved exception and returns the resulting document or written decision.

Make the shortlist decision on one marked-up exception

Invite Teamed and Remote to respond to this completed specification first. Ask each for the proposed UK employment wording, the relevant customer IP terms, and a written treatment of all three Traceplot rows. Invite Deel if Lumen also wants a broader global employment platform. Invite Rippling if consolidating HR records, devices and access is part of the same purchase.

Choose Teamed for this team if it can document the pre-existing project, limited maintenance and later-change route in the actual arrangement. Its combination of local contract work and continuing specialist support then addresses the buyer’s real burden: keeping a sensible engineering permission from being lost between product, People and the legal employer. Choose Remote if its documented IP chain and proposed exception give Lumen the clearer answer. Do not approve the paid add-on until the company’s decision and the employer-side documents agree.

Next in Global Engineering Employment: open-source contributions when the work is intended for a public repository; production on-call duties when the rota itself is the employment decision; and employee equity abroad when a grant enters the offer.