What You Should Know When Hiring Golang Programmers

If you’re trying to go fast, you need someone who knows Go well. Golang developers are in high demand, and with rising salaries and a limited talent pool, finding the right one isn’t as simple as scanning a resume for keywords.

Golang powers scalable and high-performance back-end systems used by companies ranging from startups to enterprise giants like Dropbox and Uber. A Golang developer is a role that’s critical to long-term success but easy to hire poorly for if you don’t know what to look for or where to find qualified Golang programmers.

Whether you’re hiring in-house or remotely in the US or you’re exploring global talent markets, this guide will walk you through how to hire Golang programmers without wasting time or budget. We’ll cover what these developers do, how much they cost, what skills to prioritize, where to find them, how to evaluate candidates, which interview questions to ask, what mistakes to avoid, and when to consider bringing in expert help.

What Do Golang Programmers Do?

Golang developers build scalable, high-performance back-end systems that keep modern applications running quickly and reliably.

They’re often behind the core functionality of web services, APIs, and cloud-based platforms, especially in industries that need to process large volumes of data or handle concurrent users efficiently. A Golang programmer typically works on REST or gRPC API development, builds and manages microservices, designs database schemas (both SQL and NoSQL), and integrates CI/CD pipelines to support continuous deployment.

Within a team, they often collaborate closely with front-end developers, DevOps engineers, and product managers. Their job is to turn business logic into clean, testable code that can scale without reinventing the wheel every sprint. 

Golang (or just “Go”) is a popular choice for this kind of work because of its performance, simplicity, and strong concurrency model. It’s now used by over 4.7 million developers globally, making it more widely adopted than other popular programming languages like Ruby or Rust in back-end engineering.

What Golang programmers don’t do is design interfaces or focus on front-end user experience. While some Golang developers may have full-stack capabilities, their core responsibilities stay server side.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Golang Programmer?

Salaries for Golang developers vary based on experience level, location, and hiring method. In the US, demand has grown faster than supply. As a result, full-time Golang engineers often earn some of the highest salaries among back-end developers. 

The language’s popularity plays a big role in this trend. According to the 2024 Stack Overflow survey, 14.4% of professional developers use Golang. More adoption means more competition for qualified candidates, which pushes salaries even higher.

Here’s what you can expect to pay when hiring full-time in the US:

• Junior: $68,000 – $141,000
• Mid-level: $82,000 – $163,000
• Senior: $100,000 – $219,000

If you’re open to hiring internationally, you can access top-tier talent at significantly lower rates without compromising on quality. In Latin America, for example, salary expectations reflect the regional cost of living, not a lack of skill or experience.

Typical full-time salaries in Latin America:

• Junior: $30,000 – $48,000
• Mid-level: $48,000 – $60,000
• Senior: $60,000 – $100,000

If you look at our cost savings calculator, that translates to savings of roughly 56–66% for junior roles, 41–63% for mid-level, and 40–54% at the senior level. In practical terms, it means you can often hire a senior-level developer on a mid-level budget. It also means you can grow your team without stretching resources.

Hiring offshore isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about tapping into global markets where your budget goes further and building teams that are both cost effective and high performing. If you’re looking for vetted professionals in this space, there are several great companies for hiring top Latin American developers.

What Skills Should You Look for When Hiring a Golang Programmer?

The best Golang developers don’t just write performant code. They think critically about scalability, understand how systems interact, and know how to communicate their decisions across teams. 

Hiring the right developer means looking beyond GitHub contributions or buzzword-filled resumes. You want someone who can contribute meaningfully to your product’s architecture and work well with others while doing it.

Here’s how to break that down.

Hard skills (the must-haves)

Strong Golang developers have:

• Concurrency fundamentals: They should be comfortable using goroutines and channels to build concurrent applications. Ask how they’ve handled tasks that require parallel processing or efficient memory use. Good candidates will explain trade-offs between concurrency models in Go and how they’ve applied them to real-world systems.
• API development experience: Golang is now more popular than Node.js for automated API requests. Developer candidates should be able to discuss how they’ve built RESTful or gRPC APIs, handled JSON data, and managed request validation and error handling.
• SQL and NoSQL database knowledge: A deep understanding of both relational and non-relational databases is key for back-end work. Look for candidates who can explain how they model data, manage schema changes, and optimize queries.
• Experience with microservices: Ask how they’ve structured projects into services and managed inter-service communication. Bonus points if they can speak to managing service boundaries, scaling independently, or using tools like gRPC or message queues.
• Docker and Kubernetes: These are industry standards for containerization and orchestration. Top candidates will have hands-on experience building Docker images, writing Dockerfiles, and deploying to Kubernetes.
• CI/CD integration: Continuous delivery is a standard part of modern software teams. Look for candidates who’ve set up or contributed to pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI.

Soft skills (equally important)

While technical expertise gets projects off the ground, soft skills keep them moving in the right direction. We've found that the most successful Golang developers possess these key skIlls and traits:

• Clear communication: This is especially important when explaining technical decisions to product managers, designers, or less-experienced developers. Good candidates will answer questions in plain language and can adapt their depth based on the audience.
• Ownership and initiative: Look for people who speak in terms of outcomes, not just tasks. Do they say, “I shipped a feature that reduced load time by 40%” or “I helped a senior developer with back-end work”?
• Problem-solving mindset: Great candidates will explain not just what they built, but why they built it that way. Ask how they approach trade-offs or debugging under pressure.
• Receptiveness to feedback: According to our recruiters who specialize in this role, the best candidates can describe how feedback helped improve their work. If someone struggles to give a clear example, it may suggest a lack of reflection or collaboration.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Golang developers often work with DevOps, front-end development teams, and product stakeholders. Strong candidates will share how they’ve communicated across disciplines to move a project forward.

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

While not required for every role, these skills can help candidates stand out. They’re especially important in growth-stage companies or specialized domains:

• Experience with GraphQL or gRPC: Both are widely used in modern service architecture. Candidates familiar with these protocols can help teams transition from REST or improve system efficiency.
• Other back-end languages: Knowing Rust, Node.js, or Python helps developers pick the right tool for the job and contribute to polyglot teams.
• High-availability experience: Candidates who’ve worked on systems with 99.99% uptime requirements can bring valuable insights around failover strategies, load balancing, and system observability.
• Infrastructure-as-code familiarity: Tools like Terraform or Pulumi aren’t required, but familiarity can make it easier for developers to collaborate with DevOps and manage cloud-based deployments.

Where Can You Find and Hire Great Golang Programmers?

Hiring Golang developers starts with two key decisions: 

Where you’re sourcing talent from and how you’ll go about finding them.

Let’s break down both.

Choosing the right location (local, remote US, or offshore)

Your first choice is whether to hire someone in your city, remotely within the US, or from the global talent pool. Each option comes with benefits and trade-offs related to collaboration, cost, and access to skills.

In-office/local developers

• Direct collaboration with existing teams
• Easier onboarding and internal alignment
• Higher cost due to US salary benchmarks

Remote US-based developers

• Expands your search beyond your immediate area
• Familiar with US work culture, communication styles, and compliance expectations
• Still commands US-level salaries, especially with the rising demand for Go

Offshore developers

• Much larger talent pool, with wider access to senior-level experience
• Significant cost advantages (often 40–60% savings)
• May require alignment across time zones or communication styles, depending on the region

For many companies, hiring offshore makes it easier to find highly specialized Golang talent without compromising quality. Latin America is often a top choice because of its time zone compatibility, strong back-end engineering culture, and ease of real-time collaboration. In our experience placing talent from this region, companies often find that technical skills are on par with US standards, while hiring costs remain far more manageable.

If your team prefers asynchronous workflows and your priority is cost savings, you might also consider engineers from South and Southeast Asia (India, Vietnam, Philippines) or Eastern Europe (Poland, Estonia, Serbia). These regions offer excellent developers, though time zone gaps can make real-time collaboration more challenging.

Choosing the right sourcing channel

Once you’ve settled on your hiring geography, the next decision is how you’ll actually find the right developer. The best sourcing method depends on your hiring timeline, internal capacity, and the level of vetting you want upfront.

Here’s how the main sourcing channels compare:

Choosing the right sourcing channels matters just as much as where you hire. If you’re exploring global talent markets, it helps to understand the full process of how to hire an outsourced software developer and what to expect at each step.

How to Hire the Best Remote Golang Programmers: Best Practices

Hiring great Golang developers is never easy, and the competition for experienced candidates is only getting tighter. Having a well-defined process before the job post goes live can make the difference between a rushed hire and a long-term asset.

Here's how to approach each stage of the process with clarity and intention.

Stage 1: Before and during sourcing

Set the foundation before launching your search.

Don’t chase unicorns—define what “great” actually looks like

One of the biggest mistakes teams make is trying to hire someone who can do everything. Instead of looking for a full-stack expert who also handles DevOps and product strategy, focus on what your current stack and roadmap require. Are you building with microservices or maintaining a monolith? Will this person work independently or within an existing back-end team?

The clearer your expectations, the easier it is to attract candidates who are actually equipped for the role.

Avoid rigid degree requirements—they can filter out top talent

In our experience matching hundreds of candidates in this field, some of the best Golang developers don’t have college degrees. This is especially true in Latin America, where many engineers start working before graduating. 

A narrow educational filter can exclude people who are already shipping production-quality code for global companies.

Write an effective job description that speaks to your real needs

Your job post should highlight the specific tools, responsibilities, and outcomes you care about. If your team relies heavily on Docker, CI/CD pipelines, or SQL performance tuning, include those upfront. 

If you're looking for niche experience like distributed systems or observability tooling, include those details clearly when writing your software developer job description. That level of detail helps attract qualified candidates and shortens time to hire. 

If you’re not sure how to word something, our ultimate guide on how to write remote job descriptions has everything you need to get started.

Stage 2: Screening and evaluation

Go beyond resumes. Test how candidates think, communicate, and build.

Use practical test projects, not trick questions

A top tip from our recruiter is to use small, real-world tasks to assess technical abilities. These can include debugging broken code, refactoring a messy function, or building a basic API with unit tests. This gives you insight into how candidates approach structure, error handling, and scalability.

Look for clean, readable code and logical decisions. The goal isn’t perfection but clarity, thoughtfulness, and attention to edge cases.

Ask candidates to explain their thinking in plain language

According to our recruiters who specialize in this role, strong candidates can clearly explain decisions without hiding behind jargon. For example, they should be able to explain why they chose a specific concurrency pattern in Go or how they handled a performance bottleneck without diving straight into technical buzzwords.

We’ve found that the most successful candidates typically communicate well across teams. If someone can explain their solution clearly to a product manager or junior developer, they likely understand it well themselves.

Look for signs of ownership and real-world experience

Ask about a time they made a mistake and how they handled it. Or ask how they responded to tough feedback. Candidates who give vague or overly polished answers may not have the depth you're looking for.

We recommend paying close attention to how candidates talk about past roles. Do they describe projects in terms of outcomes and business value or just list tech tools they used? The former usually signals a stronger long-term fit.

Stage 3: Making the offer and closing the deal

Once you’ve found the right person, don’t lose them to delays or unclear expectations.

Move quickly and communicate clearly

A slow hiring process is one of the most common reasons companies lose strong candidates. If you take too long to schedule interviews or provide feedback, someone else will move faster. 

Set expectations about your timeline early, keep candidates updated, and be ready to make a decision when the right person comes along.

Treat your offer like a pitch, as the best candidates have options

Golang developers are in high demand. If you find someone with clean, efficient code habits and the ability to think beyond the immediate task, your offer should show them that this is a role worth accepting. It needs to offer more than just a paycheck.

Ask yourself:

• What makes this opportunity meaningful beyond salary?
• Are you offering flexibility or real autonomy over architecture decisions?
• Can you outline a clear path for growth, ownership, or leadership?
• Are you showing that technical quality is supported and not just expected?

When hiring outside the US, go beyond compensation. Mention whether you pay in USD, respect local holidays in your PTO policy, and offer support during onboarding. These details show that you're thinking about the full experience, not just the transaction.

Highlighting these benefits, along with a clear onboarding plan and a defined product roadmap, can make your offer more appealing than one that simply offers more money. You can read more about how to make a strong offer to hire and retain top talent in our guide.

Top Interview Questions for Hiring Golang Programmers That Reveal the Right Fit

Interviewing Golang developers isn’t just about testing syntax knowledge or asking how many years they’ve used the language. You want to understand how they think, how they solve problems, and how well they collaborate with others on technical decisions. 

The best questions reveal how candidates approach trade-offs, structure projects, and handle feedback. Here are five questions to ask and what to listen for.

“Tell me about a time you had to refactor Go code for scalability. What trade-offs did you make?”

This question reveals how the candidate approaches long-term architecture decisions. It also shows how well they understand the performance characteristics of Go and where scalability problems typically arise.

Strong answers include specific examples of what they changed and why. Look for mentions of things like memory use, concurrency, modularization, or reducing tight coupling between services. Bonus points if they can explain what measurable impact the refactor had.

Red flags include vague descriptions, no clear outcome, or an overemphasis on rewriting code instead of improving it incrementally.

“How would you explain goroutines and channel patterns to a junior developer or product manager?”

According to our recruiters who specialize in this role, this is one of the best ways to test communication skills and depth of understanding. If someone can explain complex topics clearly, they likely have a solid understanding of them.

Strong candidates will adjust their explanation depending on the audience. For a junior developer, they might use analogies or visual examples. For a product manager, they might explain how concurrency in Go improves performance without diving into technical details.

Watch out for overly technical jargon or answers that confuse more than clarify.

“Walk me through a time you had to fix a performance bottleneck in a Go application.”

This question helps assess whether a candidate has strong problem-solving skills and an ability to diagnose and fix real-world issues under pressure.

Good answers should describe how they identified the issue, what tools or profiling methods they used, and what solution they implemented. They should also reflect on the outcome and whether it introduced any new challenges.

Weak answers tend to gloss over the problem-solving process or avoid explaining how they verified the fix.

“What kind of feedback have you received that helped improve your code or collaboration?”

The candidate’s answer to this question gives insight into their ability to grow. In our experience, developers who can reflect honestly on feedback are more likely to work well in teams and improve over time.

Look for answers that show self-awareness, openness to critique, and a willingness to apply that feedback in future projects.

Be cautious if the candidate avoids the question or only mentions superficial feedback. That can signal a lack of reflection or experience working in collaborative environments.

“How do you structure your Go projects to keep them testable and maintainable?”

This question tests how candidates approach architecture, modularity, and long-term maintainability—all key traits for back-end engineers.

Strong responses include examples of separating concerns, using interfaces for dependency injection, writing unit and integration tests, and organizing code for clarity and reusability.

Red flags include vague answers or overly rigid patterns that don’t adapt well to the specific project.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring Golang Programmers

Even with a clear hiring process, it’s easy to make small missteps that lead to costly delays or the wrong hire. Golang developers bring specialized back-end expertise, and overlooking the specifics of this role often leads to mismatched expectations or missed opportunities. 

Here are some of the most common mistakes we see—and how to avoid them.

1. Over-prioritizing degrees and missing out on strong self-taught developers

A formal degree doesn't guarantee practical skill, especially in back-end development. Some of the best Golang engineers start working professionally before finishing a degree or skip formal education altogether. 

Instead, focus on practical experience. Look for project ownership, open-source contributions, and performance outcomes. Use technical assessments to evaluate ability, not just resumes.

2. Asking for “unicorn” developers who do everything

It’s tempting to write a job description that asks for one person to handle front end, back end, infrastructure, security, and maybe a little UI design too. But the more hats you ask a developer to wear, the harder it becomes to hire well—and the more likely you’ll burn them out.

Expecting them to also manage React components, configure Kubernetes clusters, and run user research is unrealistic. Be clear about your priorities and hire for depth where it matters most.

3. Stretching out the process with too many interviews or tests

A slow hiring process can cost you great candidates. When companies add multiple rounds of interviews, long take-home assignments, or unclear timelines, developers lose interest or accept other offers.

In our experience, the most successful hires happen when companies respect candidates’ time and move decisively. If you're giving a technical assessment, make sure it's short, relevant, and followed up with timely feedback.

4. Being vague about how Go fits into the long-term roadmap

Candidates want to understand where the tech they’re working with is headed. If your job description or interview process is vague about how Go fits into your architecture or whether it's being phased in or out, it can raise red flags for senior developers.

Be transparent about whether Go is your primary back-end language or one of several in use. Share how it fits into your infrastructure and what the team is building with it in the next 6 to 12 months.

5. Relying only on resumes or portfolios to judge skill

A clean resume or impressive GitHub doesn't tell you how a developer thinks. Many companies skip the deeper technical conversations or hands-on tests that reveal how a candidate solves real-world problems.

Ask for a short, role-specific project or live coding session. Use that time to evaluate communication, logic, and approach to structure, not just syntax. Teams that follow smart offshore developer hiring practices often build this into their process to identify stronger long-term contributors.

Why Working With a Recruiting Partner Makes a Difference

Hiring on your own can absolutely work, especially if you have the time and know exactly what you’re looking for. But when you need to move quickly, fill technical roles, or expand your team internationally, the process can become time-consuming and inconsistent.

A good recruitment partner helps clarify your priorities, pre-vets candidates based on real requirements, and shortens your time to hire by removing unnecessary steps. This is especially valuable for back-end roles like Golang developers, where both technical skill and communication matter.

If you're hiring outside the US, working with a partner becomes even more important. These partners can manage legal and compliance responsibilities, help you structure offers that make sense in the local market, and reduce the chances of making bad hires from misalignment or rushed decisions.

Recruitment partners are a smart choice when you're scaling a team, hiring for a niche developer role, or trying to avoid time lost on misfires. You save time and reduce risk while gaining access to candidates who are already vetted for your needs.

Hiring solo is always an option, but a partner can often get the right person in the role faster, especially if you're hiring across borders or time zones.

Final Thoughts

Hiring a Golang developer means looking beyond technical skills. Clean, testable code matters, but so do clear communication, collaborative thinking, and a mindset aligned with your product goals. Whether you’re building a new feature or scaling your core platform, the right hire will make a lasting impact.

If working with a recruitment partner seems like the right approach for your needs, why not consider a specialized firm that can make the hiring process efficient and low-risk?

At Near, we take the time to understand your Golang and broader development needs before matching you with pre-vetted candidates. If you're looking to hire a Golang programmer, we can connect you with top Latin American talent who work in US time zones and deliver strong results at regionally fair rates.

Book a free consultation with Near to get started.