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The roles behind “One Engineering Role in Three at US Tech Companies Is Open Abroad. One in a Hundred Is in Latin America”

Read on 29 September 2026 from the public Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever job-board APIs. 387 board names were tried and 201 boards answered with at least one posting; where one name answered on two systems the larger board was kept, which left 187 boards and 22,896 postings of every kind. A posting qualified when its title described a software, data, machine learning, security, platform, mobile, infrastructure or forward-deployed engineering role and was not a management, sales, solutions, developer-relations, hardware, research or design role. Interns and new-graduate roles are kept and marked. That left 4,846 postings from 174 companies.

Postings were merged into roles. Some boards publish one role as several postings, one per place. Postings of one company that share a title and the opening 400 characters of text are counted as one role, and their places are added together. That left 3,991 roles. A role open in three countries counts once in every total and once in each of the three country rows, so country rows add up to more than the total.

Countries come from the board, not from the text. Each role carries the location string a visitor sees, any additional locations or offices the board attaches, and on Ashby and Lever a structured country field. Every one of the 882 distinct location strings was mapped to countries by a written gazetteer and then read by eye; the full mapping is the last table but one on this page. A string that names only a region (“EMEA”, “Americas”) or nothing (“Remote”, “Hybrid”) gives no country, and a role with no country at all is left out of the shares.

The main sample is companies based in the United States: 148 of the 174, with 3,465 roles, 3,441 of them with at least one country. Where each company is based, and the source for it, is listed company by company below. Roles of the other 26 companies are in the data and in the last table, and are kept out of the country counts.

Remote, hybrid or office comes from the board’s own workplace field on Ashby and Lever; Greenhouse has no such field, so there the word “remote” or “hybrid” in the location decides. Seniority comes from the title; a title with no marker counts as mid. The labeling was done by code, the mapping and the pay sentences were then read by a language model (Claude) and by no one else; nothing here was checked by a human reader, which is why every row is printed. Long dashes inside titles, places and quoted sentences are printed on this page as hyphens, and between two amounts as “to”; the data files keep them as the boards wrote them.

An independent second reader, also a language model, was given the place strings of 100 roles drawn at random and nothing else, and named the countries for each. It agreed with the study on 100 of the 100; both readings are in agreement-sample.json.

The same rows as data: roles.json, locations.json, companies.json, pay-pairs.json, rates.json. Every figure in the article, with the checks behind it (the sample without its five largest contributors, with only the companies that state a headquarters, counted in postings instead of roles), is in results.txt, the unedited output of the analysis script. The scripts are in the site repository under growth/research/engineering-by-country.

Where a role is open

24 more roles name a region or nothing and are not in the table.

By country

Companies based in the United States. Share is of the 3,441 roles with a country.

By region

Roles open outside the United States. A role counts once in each region it is open in.

By the clock

Hours in which a 9:00 to 17:00 day in the country coincides with a 9:00 to 17:00 day in New York and in San Francisco, computed for 29 September 2026 from the time zone of the city named. A role open in several countries is placed by the country that shares the most hours with New York.

Every role open in Latin America

Companies based in the United States: 34 roles at 13 companies.

The same role, two pay bands

88 roles at 23 companies print a base pay band in US dollars and a band in another currency for the same role. A band is two different annual amounts joined by a dash or “to”; bands introduced as on-target earnings or total compensation, single numbers printed as a range, and bands printed per level are left out. A dollar sign with no currency code counts as US dollars only on a posting whose places are all in the United States, and as Canadian dollars only when the sentence says so. Midpoint is compared with midpoint after converting at the European Central Bank reference rate for 2026-09-28 (1.4166 CAD to the dollar, 0.75396 GBP to the dollar, 0.87889 EUR to the dollar). When a role prints several US bands for different pay zones the lowest is used, and when it prints several bands in the other currency the highest is used, so the gap shown is the smallest one the posting supports.

Companies

The name is the board’s own short name. A company counts as based in the United States when it states a headquarters there, or when it says it has no headquarters and the address in its filings, on its site or in a directory is there. A company with headquarters in two countries, or with no address found, is left out of the main sample, and so is every company based elsewhere. The sources were collected on 29 September 2026; where the only source is Wikipedia, a directory or a press dateline the note says so.

Every location string and how it was read