Demonstrating Employer-Employee Relationship in Modern H-1B Filings

Control is evaluated across several dimensions: who assigns work, who supervises day-to-day performance, who conducts evaluations, who sets compensation, and who has authority to reassign or terminate. A filing that answers all five questions with the petitioner is far stronger than one that answers only the payroll question.

Engineering leadership should be able to name the internal manager responsible for each placed engineer and produce that manager's review notes on request.

When an engineer may work at more than one client location or across the duration of several project phases, the filing benefits from an itinerary describing the sequence of work, the duration of each phase, and the location associated with each.

Distributed delivery makes this easier, not harder: a roadmap of platform milestones already describes phases and durations in a form that maps cleanly onto an itinerary.

Master service agreements and statements of work should state clearly that the vendor supervises its own personnel, retains the right to substitute qualified engineers, and owns performance management. Language that gives the client hiring, firing, or direct supervisory authority undermines the relationship the filing asserts.

Reviewing MSAs against this standard before signature avoids a mismatch that is very difficult to correct later.

Sprint assignments in the tracker, internal code review approvals, architecture decision records signed by the employer's principal engineers, and internal performance reviews all demonstrate control without any additional documentation effort.

The most credible filings assemble evidence that the organization would have created anyway, because manufactured documentation is easy to spot and hard to defend.