Why Forward-Thinking CTOs Are Turning to Latin America to Build Better Engineering Teams

When US companies come to Hire With Near to hire engineers, the reason they name most often is that they want to move off an offshore team. 

Cost savings comes second. In all, 45% of the engineering companies we talk to are leaving an offshore team or a dev agency, and they're mostly startups and mid-size businesses.

For a lot of companies, offshore and agency teams work fine. But the leaders I talk to keep hitting the same friction: the offshore team is logging off just as the US team gets going, a code review can sit overnight, and the engineers building the product never really join the company that owns it.

I've watched more and more engineering leaders decide they want full-time engineers who work their hours and sit on their team, so they're hiring software engineers in Latin America. In this article, I'll cover why they're making that move and what they gain from it.

Why Does a Time Zone Gap Slow Down Offshore Engineering Teams?

A lot of the leaders I talk to are replacing the offshore and outsourced teams they relied on for years. The typical setup put a development team in Asia or Eastern Europe in charge of the build, often through an outsourcing firm, while the US team set the direction.

That model ships good software for plenty of companies. But what I hear from CTOs is that it puts distance between the people paying for the work and the people doing it, and much of that distance is measured in hours.

A 2024 study in Organization Science, by researchers at Harvard Business School, Georgetown University, and Rice University, followed the communication of more than 12,000 employees at a multinational company. It found that the larger the time zone gap between two colleagues, the more of their work got pushed outside normal business hours for one side of the pair.

I see the same thing play out with development teams in Asia. Most of their working day falls outside yours, so a pull request that needs a quick review, or a release blocked on one open question, can wait a full day for the two schedules to line up. 

When the workdays barely overlap, your own team often ends up working longer hours just to keep projects moving.

The founder of an early-stage startup we spoke with, whose product was being built by an agency 10 hours ahead, described the point where that stopped working:

The agency I’m working with is 10 hours ahead of me on Pacific time. Now that people are onboarding, it doesn’t work that well. I need somebody who can iterate in my time zone. I need somebody who can take this from “we built product-market fit” to “we're building version one of our own code stack.”

That’s the point where I see engineering leaders move on from these short-term patches and build teams of their own, with working hours that overlap theirs. And Latin America is where a lot of them are doing it.

Why Are Engineering Leaders Hiring in Latin America?

For engineering, the biggest reason is a team they already have that isn't working, usually an offshore group or a dev agency. Cost matters, but it comes second.

In our sales conversations with US companies hiring engineers, 45% are leaving an offshore team (30%) or a development outsourcing firm (15%), according to our engineering hiring report, which draws on more than 200 of those calls. That 15% is a bigger share than in any other department we hire for.

Cost savings is the primary reason in only 26% of these conversations, which makes engineering the only department we hire for where cost isn’t the top reason. Another 10% come to us mainly because they can’t find the engineers they need in the US, which is double the rate for non-technical roles.

My read is that the companies leaving an offshore team have usually captured most of the savings over US hiring already. What they want to change is how their engineers work with the rest of the business, so they hire Latin American developers who join their own team.

Here’s what that looks like day to day:

• Overlapping working hours: Engineers based in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and other Latin American countries share much of your business day, whether your team runs on Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time. Companies write it into the role: 51% of the engineering job descriptions US companies send us name a US time zone or US business hours. At companies with 50 or fewer employees, that rises to 59%.
• Clear, fluent communication: Many engineers based in Latin America have already worked with US tech companies. They’re used to async and real-time workflows, agile processes, and explaining their technical decisions to English-speaking teams. That skill carries weight: 76% of those engineering job descriptions ask for communication skills, more than any technical practice.
• Full-time teammates: The engineers you hire this way work full-time on your product as part of your team, alongside the engineers you already have. That’s what strong candidates want too: a long-term role, room to grow, and ownership of their work.
• Savings you can put back into the team: We see companies saving 30 to 70% vs. US salaries, and many use some of those savings to offer better benefits and pay at the top of the local market, so they keep great people longer. Take a senior software engineer: in Latin America, salary expectations run $72,000 to $108,000 a year, against $140,000 to $238,000 for the same seniority in the US. Even at the top of that local range, you're paying less than the bottom of the US range. You can see more roles in our US vs. Latin America Salary Guide.

In practice, that usually means fewer handoffs and shorter feedback loops. We cover more of the questions tech leaders ask before hiring in Latin America in a separate article.

Why Are CTOs Leaving Dev Shops to Build Their Own Teams?

The reason many CTOs leave dev shops is that the agency holds the team. It assigns the engineers, moves them between accounts, and keeps the product knowledge with its own staff.

Agencies are convenient, and for a fixed-scope project they do the job well. But once the software is your product, I see these trade-offs come up again and again:

• Developers rotate in and out of your project
• Communication runs through an account manager
• Projects lose momentum when no one owns the work

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In the conversations I have with founders and CTOs who come to Hire With Near after dealing with an agency, the turning point is usually the same: they need the engineer in the standup, on the customer call, and in decisions about what to build next. It’s also the core of the choice between hiring an in-house developer or outsourcing: is your software a project with an end date, or the product itself?

By working with their engineers directly, CTOs gain control over who they hire, how new engineers get onboarded, and the culture their team works in. 

The engineer joins their team and reports to their engineering lead, with no account manager relaying requirements in between.

Developers see this from the other side too. In the video below, I talk about why top developers prefer joining a team directly over working through a dev shop:

ParkMobile, a parking and mobility platform whose app is used in more than 4,200 cities across 21 countries, is a good example of this move. It switched after years of relying on third-party agency developers for its back-end and platform work. 

Mariana Lepassar, ParkMobile’s Head of Engineering for Mobile Payments and Billing, saw that dependence as a risk to the business: “From a business viability perspective, it creates a huge risk for us.”

Lepassar wanted ParkMobile’s own platform engineers, back-end engineers, and an iOS specialist, all senior people “able to think along with the product strategy.” Hire With Near ran sourcing, English screening, and candidate management inside ParkMobile’s own applicant tracking system. 

The company hired nine Colombia-based engineers at a 24-day average time to hire, and Hire With Near placed more of those roles than any other channel, including ParkMobile’s internal sourcing. 

After seeing what the team delivered, ParkMobile's B2B leadership expanded the program and began hiring team leads in Colombia.

How Do You Build a Lasting Competitive Advantage?

A dedicated engineering team in Latin America gives you an advantage that tends to grow the longer the team stays together. Here's what I see it come down to:

• Faster hiring: With partners like Hire With Near, many teams go from kickoff to a signed offer in under three weeks.
• Longer retention: 80% of our hires stay two years or more, especially when you pay above the local market and give people room to grow. 
• Real-time productivity: When your engineers are online during your business hours, blockers usually get resolved sooner, so releases don't stall.

Over time, the team builds a deep understanding of your product that stays with you.

To build these teams, many of the CTOs I talk to work with Latin American staffing firms. Their recruiters know the local talent market, understand salary expectations, and keep track of what engineers want from their next role.

And here's what those CTOs are leaving behind:

• Cycling through freelancers on platforms like Upwork
• Working around an offshore schedule that barely overlaps their own
• Losing momentum each time agency developers rotate off the project

What Changes When Your Engineers Join Your Company?

When you move from outsourcing to building your own team, the people writing your code become part of your company. The CTOs I talk to who have made that switch describe it the same way:

• Your developers get to know your product, your customers, and the reasoning behind your backlog.
• You build institutional knowledge that lasts beyond the next project.
• You’re more likely to have the engineers who built the last release still there to build the next one.

The engineering job descriptions US companies send us point to that kind of hire: 51% ask for ownership, 56% ask for autonomy or a self-starter, and 40% describe client-facing work.

Full-stack developer is the largest single role family in the same data, at 17%. A full-stack developer works across the whole application, which often makes the role a practical first or second in-house engineering hire.

The switch takes some planning, mostly around handing over knowledge from the team you have now. You don't have to plan that handover alone. Our guide to hiring remotely in Latin America is a good place to start.

Related reading: Why One A-Player in Latin America Beats Two Average Hires in the US

How Does Hire With Near Help CTOs Hire Engineers in Latin America?

At Hire With Near, we help US engineering leaders build their own teams in Latin America. We've made 3,500+ placements for 950+ US companies, and we were ranked No. 118 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. 

For engineering, we work as IT and tech recruiters and run the search from start to finish. Our recruiting team:

• Sources from our pool of 160,000+ pre-vetted candidates and runs fresh sourcing to find the engineers who fit your stack and the way your team works.
• Runs first-round interviews where candidates walk through a project they built and what their role was.
• Presents a shortlist in 3 to 5 days, and most of our clients make a hire in under three weeks.

If you want a technical assessment or case study as part of your process, we can help you design it and administer it.

We fill 97% of the roles we take on and hold a client satisfaction score of 9.1. The engineers we place are experienced: 98% of the engineering roles we filled in 2025 went to mid-level or senior professionals, and more than half were senior. 

You can run payroll yourself or have us handle it, whichever works better for you. If a hire doesn’t work out, you’re covered: every placement is backed by a 180-day replacement guarantee (double the industry standard). We also run executive search for engineering leadership roles, such as a VP of Engineering or Head of Engineering.

I want every engineer we place to be as strong as your best US hires and still be on your team as the product grows.

A lot of the CTOs I talk to come in because something about their current team isn't working, and they want to see what the alternative looks like. Our team can share salary benchmarks and explain how hiring in Latin America works, and if it doesn't fit, we'll tell you.

Book a free consultation today

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