There are other options. I've worked for Engineering Services companies and they excel at this kind of work. We'd interview you to understand your needs, quote

There are other options. I've worked for Engineering Services companies and they excel at this kind of work. We'd interview you to understand your needs, quote a price to provide what you want and a schedule to get it done, along with maintenance as needed. Yes, I'm vastly oversimplifying to get the point across, but this might be a better model than trying to hire a single dev or create your own internal development team. I could only recommend doing that if you expected that your internal needs would grow continuously and that you could both feed your team enough work to keep them busy (and not wandering off into other jobs) and manage them well. Both of which can be far more difficult than it appears on the surface. You're not looking for an Accenture or IBM Global Services, but a small company, probably in your local city that provides custom development services. If you're in the US, I'll give Saturn Systems a plug: worked with their team before on a development project and I think this would be right up their alley.