Strategies to land remote US job while living in living in EU?

Pole here. $60k/yr is a slighly above average salary for a senior backend engineer in Poland so I think you're looking too far. It's much easier to find an even better offer from DACH countries.

I know people from Poland who work remotely for the US. Even though salary is much better ($120k is a starter), you need to assume you will be expected to participate in late night meetings, on-calls and in general assume much worse work-life balance than we, in Europe, are used to.

I’ve been living in Europe for 7 years and working remotely for US companies. Here is what I do (please tell me about better ideas!):

1. Apply to US remote jobs on the east coast and mention working from Europe. I’ve had a lot of luck overlapping for half a day. Not so great in a leadership position though.

2. Contact colleagues you like working with at US companies and see if they’re open to working with you. Someone vouching for you on the inside helps a lot.

3. Specialize in something valuable, pitch contract work, and try to convert that to full-time (or part-time or whatever).

Plug: my friend and I made a thing to address this problem because we have it too:

https://polyfill.work

You say how much you want to make, where you work from, etc., and it emails you when a company wants to hire someone like you. If you try it please let me know what you think.

The most effective way is to be active in communities for the thing you want to be doing. Get a reputation as one of the people who know what they're doing. Eventually others will start reaching out to you privately when their companies are looking for new hires. If you get your foot in the door this way, your location becomes mostly irrelevant.

Sounds unusual, but I've previously gotten very well paid jobs in multiple startups through this kind of personal networking - you even get to skip most of the interview process. Meanwhile everything I applied to without any connections has been a wash.

Negotiations are much easier if you can deal with working as a US contractor, dropping most of your employment protection laws for more money.

To get 60k/y you don't even need to work for a US company - it'll be much easier to find something in Germany or UK because of the time zone. Heck, even Polish companies offer this kind of salaries these days (they also post salary ranges most of the time so you can check it) and they're often very remote-friendly

I worked previously for a US-based company that hired engineers from around the world (Pagely) and they didn't care where anyone worked. I don't have any specific advice other than these employers exist and you just have to find them. These are good sites with ability to filter down to remote-only: https://angel.co/jobs https://remoteok.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/

If you get pushback based on complexity it creates for them having to manage payroll/tax witholding in different jurisdictions there are services like this one: https://opolis.co/ I would figure out fees for that and bake it into your proposed salary. You would have to do the math but could still represent a more cost effective hire to them and with no additional complexity... at least that's how I'd try to make the case. good luck

Many US companies hiring people from Europe are treating them as de facto employees but paying them as contractors.

This is illegal. It’s not something that the US government has been regularly enforcing. But if the trend continues and ends up on the public’s radar, that will change.

I don't want to sound negative but with current tax legislation in most EU countries, this is far more complicated than it may sound, at least to do it lawfully. Not impossible but in many cases, it requires a legal entity in your home country to be fully employed (i.e. not freelancer-based).

I investigated a somewhat related scenario: Being employed at a German legal entity with an already-remote contract and relocating to a neighboring EU country for permanent remote work. Turns out to be complicated and quite unattractive for your employer to support this, due to national tax+labor laws, potentially mandatory social insurance, etc.

Would appreciate any hints though.

I think you’re asking for a US salary rather than a US company in itself, right?

Unless you’re an exceptional performer who can command a US salary from a position in EU, I think you could: - move to the US, maybe some remote area where cost of living is minimal but you get a reasonable internet connection - apply for a full remote job that accepts digital nomads, so they ack you could work from any timezone - go back living in your EU country

You should mind any Irs or immigration office complaining, though, and you may be breaking laws.

You're looking for US companies with EU offices, basically.

You get an internationally competitive salary, and because they've got a local office, they also comply with the EU's sane employment laws.

I don't really have tips - I joined Atlassian in Sydney and transferred to Atlassian France. After a while I managed to find another job using my personal network.

At least in France some local companies are starting to realise they need to up their salary to compete with international/remote companies, so it should get better.

TopTal, Crossover, Turing etc.

Also:

https://jobboardsearch.com/remote-jobs-only

Interesting topic, would also like to know more.

Does anyone know what is the current situation with YC, do startups in U.S. hire from Europe on a B2B contract?

I scoured a little through the job listings but didn't find anything worthwhile.

Offtopic, but why are there so few mobile cross platform job postings in U.S., e.g. Flutter, including startups, why does everyone chase native development, especially when you are strapped for cash?

I met a few people with US work authorization keeping a US residence in a no income taxed state (Texas, South Dakota) and maintaining a job with that residency. They pay US federal and employment taxes. Some of them report this income to their other country of residence, whereas other do not. Some are nomadic not staying in one country long enough to be considered a tax resident. It's a legally gray area. In EU, unless they have dual citizenship or a legal reason to stay in a country for a while, they hop around due to visa issues and leave the Schegen zone to non-Eu/non-Schegen countries like Morocco, Turkey, Georgia, Romania etc.

Many are in Central/South America due to time zone simplicity. good internet is a must. Do note many countries have a digital nomad visa option.

Build your resume and your Github repos and they will come. I get cold emailed with job offers for US companies once in a while. When your LinkedIn profile has keywords like "senior" and "lead" you start getting scraped.

The main thing is timezone, if you’re past CET you’ll have a harder time working for a US company particularly if they’re west coast. For me in UTC-0 a lot of sync with PST people happens at the end of my day. For our couple of people working in CET that basically means running into the evening. Most remote jobs should state timezone preferences though.

For myself I got my job the boring, non-replicable way, through my professional network. If you have friends or ex-coworkers who’ve moved abroad it might be worth looking them up.

It might not necessarily work everywhere, but here is my experience. I live in Italy and work for the US. The company I work for specializes in a well known free software project. I contributed a few patches to that project, then met a few people from the project at FOSDEM over a beer and spent a couple of pleasant afternoons with them. I then applied and was given a technical test, but I have good reasons to believe that those patches and beers were crucial in later receiving an offer.

The engineering team at Invisible Technologies hires globally and pays above that salary range you listed (we’re US based)

We’d love to talk to you, you can either apply here https://www.invisible.co/invisible-engineering or email me personally (my email is my HN username @invisible.co)

Apply for a job at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It’s a global company, with 1.8K+ employees in 90+ countries.

You can work from wherever you want. And the company is top-notch in async working style.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

> Are there any fellow Europe based software engineers who work remotely for US companies and could share advice about landing such jobs?

Been doing for 5+ years. Assuming you're "senior" that salary is easy to get. I just search all job sites with "remote" that accept CET timezone.

Getting the $120K+ is harder though.

60k/yr (USD) - you can find this type of remote positions easily in Europe. Germany/Poland/Switzerland. Currently, this is typical average for contractors for these regions. But real experienced developers (by skill not years of service) currently can make a 100k+ USD on the European market.

If you sim for 60k/yr you don’t need to look that far… plenty of jobs in the EU at that salary range!

We (tacinsight.com) are rebuilding our entire front end from scratch and are looking for a senior javascript engineer. Preferably with prior experience in a large React project.

This is a greenfield rewrite of a tightly coupled ASP.NET frontend to React+API.

Email in profile if interested.

Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc. all have European offices. At least some of these allow fully remote work from Europe. If you’re looking for a big tech company in particular, I’d start by checking out their job boards.

If you're adamant on doing this, make sure your team is on the east coast. With a 9h difference to San Fransisco it is hard to keep your hours within 9-5. Unless you're a night owl, in which case this advice is moot.

Is there some reason to not apply for a job in an EU country? $60.000 is pretty low and getting hired in another EU country (assuming you're in the EU of cause) might be easier than getting hired by a US based company.

Luxembourg's median household income was $67,521 in 2020 in crisis. EU also offer bicycle roads and collective healthcare, what are the arguments to go in the US? Genuine question.

Use "Who is hiring/Who wants to be hired/Looking for freelancer" monthly thread, I found my first job for US company there.

remote means that you need to be closeby and in the US.