How to hire engineers overseas

Do not index

As a YC founder who's hired 60+ international engineers for two startups, I'm often asked about hiring engineers overseas. Atlas, my current company, has 20 people across 3 continents and 7 time zones.

I want to share a few things that have worked well for us in hiring international engineers. Specifically:

why we hire overseas,

where we source people,

how we source them,

and how we work with them.

Why we hire overseas

A significant advantage of remote work is the opportunity to tap into global talent, particularly from regions where workers tend to be more motivated. In my experience hiring overseas, I've found that many international employees are genuinely hungry for opportunity.

In contrast, there's a noticeable trend of entitlement among some job seekers in the US. They often expect more than just compensation; they're looking for employers to provide entertainment, social connections, and even help in achieving personal, transcendental goals. It's as if they want their workplace to serve as a combination of daycare and life coach.

Compare this to candidates from countries like Ukraine or India. Their alternatives are often limited to employers with no tech industry connections, subpar in-person workplaces, and severe power imbalances favoring the employer. In this context, offering basic respect, independence, and a compelling vision immediately sets you apart as an employer.

This dynamic creates an interesting opportunity. While you might struggle to compete with tech giants like Google or Meta for top talent in the US, you have a real chance to attract exceptional professionals in other parts of the world. Often, these international candidates are just as skilled – sometimes even more so – than their American counterparts.

Where to source candidates

Find a geography that fits your team. Below are some generalizations that I’ve found to be true (obviously, YMMV, but I’ve seen some consensus here).

Location	Pros	Cons
LatAm	• Aligned time zones with the US, great for real-time collaboration. • Latin culture often brings a strong sense of community and collaboration.	• Some developers may struggle with limited opportunities for career advancement.
India	• Large pool of highly skilled engineers, particularly from IITs and top universities. • Many engineers in India are open to startup environments and equity-based compensation.	• Significant time zone differences with the West Coast (10.5/11.5 hours), which may hinder synchronous communication. • Potentially challenging to manage a 6-day workweek culture in some cases.
Eastern Europe/UA	• Blunt and direct communication style, which can speed up decision-making. • Great for handling high-volume, complex work. • Djinni simplifies outbound sourcing.	• Limited time zone overlap with the US, communication might be slower. • Knowledge of your stack might not always align perfectly, and some experience might come from lesser-known companies.

Job descriptions

Keep it simple. You don’t need to get super cute here; the best candidates will come from outbound sourcing. And be really transparent about the work hours, benefits and salary range.

Posthog is a good example of great job descriptions: they’re easy to read, written simply, and all information is there upfront.

How to source in different regions

Outbound beats inbound when it comes to finding top engineering talent. Why? The best engineers are usually already employed. I've hired great folks through inbound applications, but the ratio of stellar to mediocre candidates is much higher when targeting happily employed people. The real challenge is convincing someone to leave their comfortable job. So, how do you make that happen?

Focus on engineers who are casually looking but haven't actively started job hunting. Where do you find these hidden gems? If you're scouting in Eastern Europe, Djinni is your secret weapon. Engineers post anonymous resumes there to avoid tipping off their current employers. Once they trust you're not their boss in disguise, they'll open up.

Searching outside Eastern Europe? It's trickier, but doable. Leverage LinkedIn and tools like Gem to create and launch outbound campaigns. Unlike sales outreach, you're less likely to get flagged as spam (just don't go overboard). Start by listing target companies in your area, then use a simple scraper to mine LinkedIn for potential candidates. Look for the right fit based on company tech stacks, developer reputations, and job titles like "Senior Software Engineer," "Sr SWE," or "Staff Engineer." Factor in years of experience too.

Use Gem again to send campaigns and funnel candidates into your interview process. While conversion rates might not be mind-blowing, this approach is often more cost-effective than posting job ads in the US.

Sourcing in LatAm

LinkedIn works great for finding LatAm engineers. If it’s your first time doing this, consider a recruiter so you can focus on just the interviewing step. (I’ve used Near successfully a handful of times; loads of agencies do this, the key thing is to find someone who passes the hire to you rather than you paying the agency who then in turn pays the engineer).

Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico are your best bets for strong talent pools. Look for engineers from companies like Nubank, Rappi, Mercadolibre, Globant, Microsoft, Google, or hot local startups. These folks often bring high-impact experience. Top universities to watch for include UBA, ITESM, USP, and Universidad de los Andes.

LatAm's got solid talent for mainstream languages like Python, Java, and JavaScript. If you need niche skills like Rust or Scala, be ready for a longer hunt – the talent pool's smaller there.

Heads up on resumes – you'll see photos and personal details (like marital status and ID numbers). And many resumes will be for project-based work. It’s common and can be just as valuable as long-term gigs.

The time zone match with the US is a huge plus for real-time collaboration. LatAm's work culture is pretty similar to the US, and English skills are solid in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. To keep these engineers around, offer clear growth paths and development opportunities – they're big on long-term potential.

Sourcing in India

Use LinkedIn to find top-notch Indian engineers.

Keep an eye out for grads from IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) or other prestigious colleges – they're usually a good bet. Great companies to source from include Gleen, Google, QuadEye, Eightfold.ai, Rubrik, Ema Unlimited, and Nutanix.

One thing to keep in mind: the time zone difference can be a bit of a pain, especially if you're on the West Coast. It’s a 10.5 to 11.5 hour gap, which means someone's always working odd hours. Make sure candidates are cool with this before moving forward.

Sourcing in Eastern Europe/UA

Use Djinni. It’s the second largest hiring platform after LinkedIn in Ukraine and most former Soviet countries (CIS countries). The format is a little different than what you’ll probably be accustomed to with LinkedIn: applicants post their resumes anonymously and you can invite them to share their contact info with you. This works really well for outbound since you don’t have to do any manual scraping, setting up outbound campaigns, finding candidate contact info, etc.

Unless you speak Russian or Ukrainian, set your English threshold to Upper-Intermediate. Choose your language and you can filter further using the search bar (eg, we use Python under the Development filters and then search for React to find full-stack developers).

Focus more on the experience of candidates than the way their profile is written, and don’t worry too much about knowing the companies they’ve worked for. Companies like EPAM, Luxoft, and Softserve can be good places to scout. Also, canned messages are definitely your friend.

Interview tweaks for international hiring

I use a fairly standard interview process with a couple of exceptions.

Project: After an algorithmic and system design interview, we have the candidate build a project — live on a call (as opposed to take-home). We give them three hours and ask them to share their screen.

Trial: This is a common practice in much of Eastern Europe and is becoming more common in the US. We tell our candidates that when they are hired, it is provisional for 3 months. We give them a clear set of goals they need to achieve each month along the way and discuss as they are progressing. The mental shift here is that if the candidate doesn’t work out, instead of firing them, you’re just not hiring them. It makes it easier for both you and them if things don’t work out so that you can optimize for a good fit rather than concerns about someone leaving after a very short period.

How to work together

Set your work hour expectations upfront. For example, we ask our engineers to be online for a 4-hour window during East Coast work hours (typically from 10am to 2pm EST). However, within that time frame, we usually only have 30 minutes of actual meeting time, allowing the rest of the window for focused work.

Have regular routines to maintain strong communication with your team. Daily standups, weekly all-hands, biweekly sprint reviews and planning sessions, and weekly one-pager reviews all help in keeping everyone aligned and on track. Especially when you’re working in different time zones or remote environments.

Compensation

Expect something along the lines of:

Eng: $36k-$48k

Sr Eng: $60k-$80k

Staff Eng: $84k-$100k

This will vary by region, but is roughly correct across LatAm, India, and Eastern Europe (notable outliers: anyone who has worked for Magnificent 7 in India as an eng will command nearly US salaries; India has an enormous range compared to other regions).

Final thoughts: is it worth it?

I was originally reluctant to consider remote hiring (and even more so, international hiring) due to my preconceived notions about lost synergies of working together in the same physical space, cultural and language gaps, time zone differences, and quality of talent.

While some of these things may be somewhat true (specifically, some of the synergies of coworking), I’ve found that the benefits of diverse viewpoints, a strongly leveraged cost to value ratio, and the ability to hire faster all outweigh the downsides.

Looking forward to your questions!