How to Find and Hire the Best Next.js Developers

If your front-end stack had a hype chart, Next.js would be right at the top. It’s fast, flexible, and built for performance. Still, it won’t do much for you if you don’t have a developer who knows how to make the most of it.

Hiring someone who truly knows how to use Next.js to build scalable, production-ready apps isn’t always straightforward. Whether you're hiring locally, remotely across the US, or looking internationally, finding the right fit takes more than just posting a job ad.

This guide will walk you through how to hire Next.js developers who can actually deliver. We’ll cover what they do, what to pay, which skills matter most, where to find strong candidates, how to evaluate them effectively, and what mistakes to avoid if you want your next hire to be the right one.

What Do Next.js Developers Do?

Next.js developers build fast, scalable, SEO-friendly web applications using the Next.js framework, which sits on top of React to deliver production-ready performance from day one.

They go beyond basic React development by handling features like server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), dynamic routing, and API integration. These capabilities make Next.js ideal for businesses that need highly performant apps with great user experience and search engine visibility.

Unlike backend developers, Next.js developers typically don’t manage infrastructure, databases, or APIs from scratch unless they’re working in a full-stack role. They also aren’t just responsible for styling interfaces. Their job is to build the full frontend logic, optimize performance, and make sure that the app behaves well across devices and networks.

Next.js developers often collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and backend teams. They translate Figma files into functional interfaces, align on API contracts, and contribute to key architectural decisions. Many also work with deployment platforms like Vercel and tools like Lighthouse to track and improve performance.

According to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Next.js ranks as the fourth most popular web framework among professional developers, making it one of the most in-demand skill sets in modern front-end development.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Next.js Developer?

Salaries for Next.js developers vary depending on experience, location, and whether you’re hiring full-time or project-based. According to our benchmarks, US-based developers typically earn:

• Junior: $62,000 – $123,200
• Mid-level: $123,200 – $134,200
• Senior: $134,200 – $145,200+

Hiring internationally can lead to meaningful savings without compromising on skill or professionalism. We’ve seen hundreds of US companies hire LatAm talent, where salaries typically fall into these ranges:

• Junior: $36,000 – $48,000
• Mid-level: $48,000 – $66,000
• Senior: $66,000 – $84,000

That translates to savings between 42% and 61%, depending on the role. Differences in offshore developer rates reflect local costs of living and not differences in ability or output. In fact, many companies use those savings to bring on senior-level talent at mid-level budgets or build out entire frontend teams instead of hiring one US-based developer.

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What Skills Should You Look For When Hiring a Next.js Developer?

Great Next.js developers do more than just write well-structured applications using React and JavaScript. They know how to build fast, scalable web apps that perform well, rank in search, and support your product as it grows. 

Hiring someone with Next.js on their resume isn’t enough. You need to know which technical skills matter most, how to spot high performers, and which traits separate solid developers from exceptional ones.

Here’s how to break that down.

Hard skills (the must-haves)

The strongest candidates bring technical depth where it counts:

• Next.js fundamentals: Developers should be fluent in server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), dynamic routing, and API routes. These are core features of the framework and critical to building production-ready apps. Ask for examples of how they’ve used these features and why.
• React proficiency: Since Next.js is built on top of React, deep knowledge of React components, hooks, and state management is essential. Candidates should be able to structure applications cleanly and explain trade-offs in component design.
• TypeScript experience: TypeScript helps catch bugs early and improve code clarity at scale. Developers should be comfortable writing typed code and understand how it improves long-term maintainability.
• REST and GraphQL integration: Many Next.js apps depend on APIs for dynamic data. Look for developers who know how to work with both REST and GraphQL endpoints, including pagination, caching, and error handling.
• Performance optimization: Next.js consistently outperforms React on SEO metrics. Smart developers build on that advantage by using Lighthouse to identify bottlenecks, eliminate render-blocking resources, and apply code splitting to reduce load times. 
• Hosting and deployment platforms: Familiarity with Vercel, Netlify, or other modern hosting platforms is a strong signal. Developers should know how to deploy apps, configure environment variables, and debug live issues.

Soft skills (equally important)

Technical skills are only part of the equation. The best developers know how to work well with others, communicate clearly, and stay focused under shifting priorities.

• Communication: Developers often collaborate across teams, so clear communication is essential. Look for people who can explain technical ideas to non-developers and walk through their thinking without jargon.
• Ownership and accountability: Strong candidates take responsibility for their work and speak confidently about past projects. They don’t just say what they did. They explain how it helped the business move forward.
• Adaptability: Priorities shift. Roadmaps change. Developers need to stay flexible and keep delivering, even when things move fast.
• Product thinking: One of our top recruiters recommends looking for candidates who understand the business value behind their work. Developers who ask thoughtful questions about goals and user needs tend to make better architectural choices and contribute more strategically.
• Receptiveness to feedback: Great developers are coachable. They reflect on feedback and use it to improve, which is critical in collaborative teams. During interviews, ask how they’ve responded to feedback in past roles and what they learned from it.

The “nice-to-have” skills (the differentiators)

These extra skills aren’t essential, but they can set a candidate apart, especially in fast-paced or growth-stage environments:

• Headless CMS experience: Tools like Sanity or Strapi are often used alongside Next.js. Familiarity with content modeling and API-driven CMS setups can speed up development and reduce bottlenecks.
• Testing frameworks: Developers who write unit and end-to-end tests using Jest, React Testing Library, or Cypress tend to produce more stable and reliable code.
• Third-party integrations: Whether it’s Stripe for payments, Auth0 for authentication, or Google Analytics for tracking, candidates with experience integrating external tools can move faster and troubleshoot more effectively.
• CI/CD and deployment pipelines: A basic understanding of continuous integration, GitHub Actions, and deployment workflows helps developers work more independently and push updates confidently.

Not every role needs all of these, but when a candidate brings several to the table, it’s usually a sign they’ve seen a few real-world challenges and know how to solve them.

Where Can You Find and Hire Great Next.js Developers?

Hiring a Next.js developer starts with two core decisions:

1. Where your developer will be located (local, remote, or international)
2. How you’ll find and evaluate candidates in that location

In this section, we’ll explore both decisions in more detail.

Choosing the location: Local, remote, or global?

Your first decision is whether to limit your search to local candidates, expand to remote talent within the US, or hire offshore.

Next.js development is highly remote-friendly. Unless your company has a strict in-office culture, there's often no real need to confine your hiring to one city or state. Expanding the search opens up access to stronger talent and greater flexibility.

Here’s how each approach compares.

Local/in-office developers:

• Real-time collaboration with on-site teams
• Easy integration into company meetings and workflows
• Simpler onboarding and payroll processes
• Often significantly higher salaries due to the cost of living in the US

Remote US-based developers:

• Wider talent pool with geographic flexibility
• Familiarity with US work culture and expectations
• No timezone delays or language barriers
• Still comes with US-level compensation

International/offshore developers:

• A much broader candidate pool across multiple regions
• Substantial cost savings (often 40–60% compared to US rates)
• Potential for stronger experience at a more sustainable salary
• Some time zone differences depending on which region you choose

If you choose to look internationally, hiring Latin American developers offers the full package. Developers in this region tend to have strong English skills, work in overlapping US time zones, and understand US business culture. 

These factors create smoother collaboration and faster development cycles, especially when compared to hiring from regions that require asynchronous communication.

When businesses in the US hire from nearby regions like Latin America, the approach is commonly referred to as nearshoring. It’s a technique that helps to balance cost, talent quality, and time zone compatibility. 

Of course, if real-time overlap isn’t essential and cost savings are the top priority, countries like India and the Philippines, and regions such as Eastern Europe, can be excellent sources of high-quality developers. However, timezone challenges are more common.

Choosing the right sourcing channel

Once you’ve decided on a location, the next step is figuring out where to look for candidates. Each sourcing channel comes with its own tradeoffs:

Each of these methods works well depending on your goals, budget, and timeline. You might even begin with referrals, explore niche job boards, and bring in a recruiting partner if the role is still unfilled.

With the right approach, hiring top developers offshore can be straightforward. The key is to understand which tradeoffs matter most to your team, whether that’s speed, cost, candidate quality, or communication alignment.

How to Hire the Best Next.js Developers: Best Practices

Finding someone with Next.js on their resume is easy. The challenge is building a hiring process that consistently attracts developers who are actually a strong fit.

Without a clear plan, companies often waste time chasing the wrong candidates or losing good ones to faster-moving teams. A structured approach helps you define what matters, evaluate real skills, and close the deal with confidence.

Here’s how to do that at each stage.

Stage 1: Clarify what you actually need

Define the role before you search

Strong hires start with clarity. Are you building something from scratch? Adding features to an existing Next.js app? Or do you just need someone to maintain what’s already there?

Clearly outlining the project scope and tech stack helps filter out the right candidates. Some developers are better suited to greenfield builds. Others are better at picking up legacy code and improving performance. Define what success looks like in the first three to six months and hire accordingly.

Avoid overloading the job description with every possible skill. Most great developers don’t claim to “do it all.” Focus on core priorities and what the developer needs to be successful in your environment.

Write a job description that speaks to the right candidate

Your job description is often your first (and only) chance to attract the right talent. Be clear about the frameworks, tools, and deployment platforms your team uses. Describe the actual day-to-day responsibilities. Specify whether the role focuses on SSR, headless CMS integration, performance tuning, or component architecture.

According to the JetBrains Developer Lifestyles survey, 30% of developers landed their current job through referrals, while 24% applied directly. That means your job description needs to do more than just exist—it has to inspire the right people to reach out. 

We break this down further in our guide on how to write a job description for a software developer.

Stage 2: Screen for real-world skills and problem-solving

Skip the whiteboard. Use practical tests instead

You don’t need abstract puzzles or hours-long take-home projects. A few small, relevant tasks are enough to reveal how a candidate works and thinks.

For Next.js developers, try short exercises like:

• Refactor a poorly written component to improve clarity and performance
• Implement server-side rendering for a specific user flow
• Build a simple API route with validation and unit tests

These tasks show how developers approach problem-solving, clean code, and scalability. More importantly, they mimic real work. This means you’re evaluating the candidate on what actually matters and what they’ll actually be doing.

Look for clear communication and thoughtful decisions

A top tip from our recruiters is to ask candidates to walk through their solution as if explaining it to someone less technical. It’s a simple way to surface their depth of understanding. Strong candidates can explain trade-offs, justify architectural choices, and highlight potential edge cases.

Pay attention to how they talk about previous roles. Developers who describe outcomes and not just tasks are more likely to take ownership in your team.

Stage 3: Move quickly and close with confidence

Act fast when you find someone great

Next.js developers don’t stay on the market long. If you wait too long between interviews, delay feedback, or spend weeks reviewing internal notes, someone else will make the offer first.

Be transparent about your timeline from the start. If someone meets your criteria, move decisively and make it clear that you value their time.

Treat your offer like a pitch, not a formality

Top Next.js developers have other options. Your offer should communicate more than just compensation.

Are you offering ownership of a product area? Room for growth? Flexibility around working hours and location?

Benefits like paid time off, learning budgets, and clear team structure often matter just as much as salary. For international hires, it’s especially important to understand local expectations and offer USD payments when possible.

If you're hiring remotely, consider additional perks that matter to remote team members. These can be things like home office stipends, wellness allowances, or asynchronous-friendly meeting policies.

Our guide to making strong offers includes practical tips on how to present opportunities that resonate and help you retain top talent.

Top Interview Questions for Hiring a Next.js Developer That Reveal the Right Fit

Interviewing a Next.js developer isn’t just about checking if they’ve used the framework. It’s about understanding how they approach architectural decisions, solve front-end challenges, and collaborate across the stack.

Here are five questions that reveal how candidates actually work and whether they’re a fit for your team.

“How do you approach choosing between getServerSideProps, getStaticProps, or client-side fetching in a Next.js project?”

This question surfaces how the candidate thinks through data-fetching strategies. It also reveals their understanding of performance trade-offs, user experience, and deployment behavior.

Strong answers explain why different methods are used in specific contexts—for example, SSR for personalized content, SSG for static marketing pages, and client-side fetching for user-specific dashboards.

Red flags: Vague explanations or candidates who rely on one method for everything.

“Can you explain how you’ve handled dynamic routing and fallback pages in a previous project?”

Dynamic routing is a key feature of Next.js, and this question helps you assess practical experience with real-world content structures or APIs.

Look for a clear explanation of how they’ve used getStaticPaths with fallback settings and how they ensured performance and error handling across routes.

Red flags: Surface-level responses that skip over loading states, error boundaries, or edge cases.

“Have you ever had to debug a hydration issue in a Next.js app? What caused it, and how did you fix it?”

Hydration bugs are a common pitfall in server-rendered apps. This question evaluates troubleshooting skills and depth of framework knowledge.

Good candidates will walk through a specific example, explaining mismatches between server and client output and how they resolved them. They often check for non-deterministic rendering or conditional browser-only logic.

Red Flags: Candidates who can’t describe a debugging process or who treat hydration issues as rare edge cases.

“Tell me about a time you had to coordinate with a backend team to structure API responses for a Next.js feature.”

Next.js developers often depend on APIs structured by others. This question highlights communication, collaboration, and technical adaptability.

Look for developers who describe how they aligned on data formats, handled loading and error states, or created fallback content when APIs were delayed.

Red flags: Candidates who blame delays on other teams without offering examples of how they helped resolve them.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring a Next.js Developer

Even with the right job description and a solid screening process, there are still a few pitfalls that can derail your search for a strong Next.js developer. These missteps often lead to wasted time, poor hires, or candidates dropping off midway through the process.

Here are five mistakes we’ve seen companies make, and how to avoid them.

1. Prioritizing price over quality

It’s easy to focus on hourly rates or salary bands when you’re trying to keep costs down, especially when hiring offshore. But when you make cost the deciding factor, you risk hiring someone who can write code but can’t deliver results.

Next.js is performance-sensitive, SEO-aware, and often used in high-impact parts of a product. If you cut corners on talent, you’ll likely spend more fixing things later.

Yes, hiring offshore can reduce costs, but the goal should always be value, not just savings. Look for developers who bring experience, problem-solving ability, and long-term thinking.

2. Over-focusing on flashy portfolios

A portfolio filled with beautiful UI doesn’t guarantee great performance under the hood. In Next.js projects, speed, architecture, and SEO often matter more than visual design.

That’s why it’s better to test candidates with short, relevant tasks that reveal how they think and code. Ask them to build or refactor something small, and then review it together. You’ll learn far more than from a polished Dribbble link.

3. Being rigid about degrees

A lot of excellent developers in Latin America and beyond don’t have formal degrees. Many started working while still in school or pursued nontraditional education paths.

If your job post requires a university degree, you might be filtering out some of your strongest candidates. Focus instead on real-world skills, project experience, and the ability to communicate clearly about technical decisions.

4. Hiring without defining your own roadmap

If you’re a startup still figuring out your tech stack or product direction, it can be tough to know what kind of developer you actually need. That’s a particularly risky position to hire from.

In situations like this, it often makes more sense to work with a dedicated offshore development company rather than freelancers or hiring directly. A good partner can help define your technical needs, guide your stack decisions, and match you with a developer who fits both the project and your goals.

5. Dragging out the process

Great Next.js developers don’t stay available for long. If your hiring process has multiple rounds, long delays between interviews, or extensive coding tests, candidates will move on before you’re ready to make an offer.

Keep your process lean and focused. Two rounds and a small practical assessment are often enough to evaluate technical and communication fit. Moving faster doesn’t mean compromising on quality. It just means respecting your candidate’s time.

Why Working With a Recruiting Partner Makes a Difference

You can absolutely hire a strong Next.js developer on your own. If you have a clear job description, time to manage the process, and technical knowledge to evaluate candidates, DIY hiring can work. 

But if you're short on time, hiring outside the US, or unsure how to assess framework-specific skills, partnering with a recruiter can save you a lot of second-guessing. This is especially helpful when hiring offshore developers, where vetting technical skills, managing time zone differences, and handling contracts across borders adds another layer of complexity.

A recruiting partner with experience in hiring Next.js developers can help you move faster, focus only on high-quality candidates, and avoid mismatches that slow your team down. The right partner won’t just forward resumes. They’ll clarify what your role actually requires, shortlist talent with the technical and communication skills you need, and align that shortlist with your product goals and work culture.

Working with a partner can also remove friction when hiring across borders. They’ll help you solve tech recruitment hurdles with remote talent and maintain compliance with local hiring laws and expectations. If you’re hiring outside the US, this is one of the most efficient ways to build your team. 

Final Thoughts

To hire Next.js developers who can contribute from day one, you need more than just technical skills. The right candidate understands performance trade-offs, communicates clearly across teams, and writes code that supports both product goals and long-term maintainability.

If working with a recruitment partner seems like the right approach, consider a team that takes the time to understand your business, your product roadmap, and your ideal team dynamic before suggesting a single candidate.

At Near, we match companies with pre-vetted Next.js developers from across Latin America. Our process starts with a deep dive into your needs, whether you're launching a new project, scaling your existing app, or filling a critical frontend gap. Then we connect you with developers who align with your technical stack, working hours, and budget, without sacrificing quality.

Book a free consultation to get matched with Next.js developers within 21 days.