When a US engineering leader considers hiring a contractor in another country, one question comes up fast and stops a lot of deals: who owns the code they write? If the person is not an employee, and they are in another legal system, does the company actually own what it paid for?
It is a smart question, because the default answer is not automatically the one you want. But it is a solved problem, and the solution is a single clause.
The default is not what most people assume
In the US, work created by an employee within their job is generally owned by the employer by default. Work created by an independent contractor is not. Absent a written agreement, the contractor can retain ownership of what they made, and the client only has an implied license to use it. That surprises people, and it is exactly why the fear is legitimate when there is no contract.
So the fix is simple: do not operate without a contract. The moment there is a written agreement with the right clause, the ambiguity disappears.
The clause that settles it
A proper contractor agreement includes an intellectual-property assignment: language stating that all work product created under the agreement is assigned to the client on creation, or on payment. With that clause, the company owns the code, the same as if an employee had written it. This is standard, it is not exotic, and any competent contract template for engineering work includes it.
A well-drafted version also handles the neighboring details:
- assignment of the deliverables and any related IP created for the project
- a waiver of moral rights where the local law recognizes them, so nothing is clawed back later
- confidentiality, so the work and the company’s information stay protected
- a carve-out for the contractor’s pre-existing tools and libraries, so both sides know what was already theirs
Does it hold across borders?
Yes, when it is written properly. IP assignment provisions are enforceable across the major European jurisdictions where these engineers live, and international contractor agreements do this routinely. The contract typically specifies governing law and a dispute mechanism, so both sides know the rules in advance. This is not frontier legal territory; it is the same structure global companies use with vendors everywhere.
The real takeaway
“Who owns the code” is not a reason to avoid hiring abroad. It is a reason to not hire abroad carelessly. With a one-page contractor agreement that includes IP assignment, the company owns its code cleanly, the engineer knows exactly what they are handing over, and the question that stopped the deal becomes a paragraph everybody signs and forgets.
The difference between a risky cross-border hire and a clean one is usually just the paperwork done right. See how the structure handles IP, payment, and the rest before the first line of code.