Do you have an office in the UAE?
No. We are transparent about this. Decipher Consultancy Services is a Gurugram India-based firm with our engineering team, delivery leadership and founder based in India. We do not currently operate a Dubai or Abu Dhabi office. What we do is fly in for kickoff, on-site discovery workshops and quarterly executive reviews when the engagement calls for it. For day-to-day work we run a dedicated Slack channel, weekly Zoom checkpoints and 90 percent workday overlap with Gulf Standard Time. Many UAE clients prefer this model because they get real senior engineering time at India rates without paying DIFC or ADGM office overheads baked into the invoice.
How do you handle time zones between India and the UAE?
GST is only 1.5 hours behind IST, so it is close to a perfect overlap. Our team is live from 11:30 AM GST (1:00 PM IST) through 7:00 PM GST every workday, and typically earlier on request. That is a solid 7 to 8 hour real-time overlap window for Slack, Teams, video calls, code review and design sessions. UAE weekend is Saturday and Sunday, which matches India, so you never lose a business day to weekend mismatch. On-call rotation for production incidents runs 24/7 with 15-minute acknowledgment.
Can you invoice in AED?
Yes. UAE clients are typically invoiced in AED or USD from our India entity via SWIFT wire transfer. We provide GST-compliant Indian tax invoices which most UAE finance teams accept as vendor invoices for AP processing. For DIFC or ADGM registered entities we can align paperwork to your procurement template. VAT in the UAE is generally out of scope for services delivered from outside the UAE, and we do not add Indian GST on export invoices for UAE clients. Standard payment terms are net-15 or net-30.
Do you support Arabic language and RTL interfaces?
Yes. We build AI chatbots and interfaces with English and Arabic (both MSA and Gulf dialect) support. For RAG chatbots we tune the retrieval pipeline for Arabic queries, handle transliteration, and use models that perform well on Arabic (GPT-4, Claude, Command R+, plus fine-tuned Arabic-first models where the use case demands it). UI work is RTL-native, not RTL-as-an-afterthought, with proper Arabic typography, number formatting and calendar handling for both Gregorian and Hijri dates.
Are you familiar with UAE compliance requirements like PDPL and CBUAE norms?
Yes. We work to the UAE Federal Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) and Central Bank of UAE cyber and outsourcing norms for BFSI engagements. For DIFC entities we align with the DIFC Data Protection Law 2020, and for ADGM entities with the ADGM Data Protection Regulations 2021. Data residency inside the UAE is available via AWS Middle East (UAE and Bahrain) regions or Microsoft Azure UAE North and UAE Central. We complete your security questionnaire and provide our controls documentation up front.
Who owns the code, models and prompts?
You do. All code, model weights, fine-tuned adapters, prompts, evaluation datasets and infrastructure-as-code we produce for you is your work-for-hire IP under the MSA. Everything lives in your GitHub, GitLab or Azure DevOps organisation. Contract governing law is your choice: English law under DIFC courts, ADGM law, UAE onshore law or Indian law. When the engagement ends, you keep everything and we do not resell your data, prompts or models to anyone.
What happens if we need on-site engineers in Dubai or Abu Dhabi?
We fly in. Kickoff week is on-site by default for engagements above AED 100,000. Quarterly executive reviews are on-site when the client asks. For specific milestones like go-live, UAT with a bank IT team, or a workshop with your Sharia review board, we book travel and are on the ground within 5 to 7 working days. Travel and accommodation for on-site visits are billed at cost, not marked up. If you need a full-time embedded engineer in Dubai for 3 or more months we help set up a secondment arrangement rather than pretending we have a local bench.
