South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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An API Developer designs, builds, and maintains the APIs that power both internal services and external integrations: REST, GraphQL, webhooks, gRPC. They own contracts, versioning, performance, and the developer experience for everyone consuming the API. The role demands strong back-end fundamentals plus the discipline to ship clean, documented, backward-compatible interfaces. Bad APIs cost real engineering time across the org.
API Developer salaries align with senior back-end developer rates. Expect an average U.S. salary of $10,400 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $3,600 per month, creating potential savings of up to 65%. LatAm has produced a strong API engineering bench, with engineers shipping production APIs at scale for U.S. SaaS, fintech, and platform companies.
Yes, API development is fully remote-friendly. South contracts the developer locally, runs payroll and compliance, and bills you monthly. They join your GitHub, Slack, and on-call rotation day one. Time-zone alignment lets pair programming, code review, and same-day deploys run without async drag.
Deep back-end fundamentals, fluency with at least one API framework (FastAPI, Express, Spring, Rails), and a strong instinct for API design (resource modeling, versioning, error handling). Look for developers who have shipped APIs consumed by external customers and can walk through breaking-change migrations. Run a small live design exercise: design a webhooks API with retries and idempotency.
FastAPI, Express, Spring Boot, Rails, or Django REST Framework as the framework. Postman or Insomnia for testing. OpenAPI/Swagger for spec. Stoplight or Redocly for docs. Apollo or Hasura for GraphQL. Kong, Apigee, or AWS API Gateway for management. PostgreSQL or MySQL on the data side. Redis for caching. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS or GCP for deploy.
A Back-End Developer is broader and may work on services without external API surface. An API Developer specializes in the API layer: contract design, versioning, developer experience, public-facing surface. They share most fundamentals. For service-only work, hire a Back-End Developer. For public APIs or platform work, hire an API Developer.
South vets LatAm API developers through technical interviews, take-home design exercises, and code reviews. You see a shortlist in seven to ten days, run your own interviews, and onboard inside two to three weeks. South handles the contract, monthly payments, and a replacement guarantee. Schedule a free call here to get started!
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
We recommend market pay which varies for each role. See our salary guide and success stories for some ideas.
Then, we have two different models:
Staffing (most popular) - We charge a small monthly fee for each employee's monthly salary to make the process hassle-free. The fee covers sourcing, recruiting, admin, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if necessary at any point. There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments. You only pay if you make a hire.
Headhunting - A one-time simple fee once we've found the perfect candidate. This comes with a 120-day replacement guarantee.
For both options, you only pay something if we find you someone great that you want to hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
