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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Backend hiring usually comes down to language fit. Server-side PHP work still calls for a PHP Developer, while high-performance services lean on a Golang Programmer or a Rust Developer. Systems-level work calls for a C Developer, and the Microsoft stack is covered by a C# Developer or an ASP.NET Developer. Data-heavy analytical services sometimes need an R Developer. For the API layer itself, hire an API Developer or a GraphQL Developer depending on whether you're standardizing on REST or GraphQL.
A Back-End Developer designs and builds the systems behind the UI: APIs, databases, business logic, queues, caches, authentication, and integrations. They worry about performance, scalability, security, and data integrity. On a mature team, back-end engineers typically own a service or domain end-to-end and partner with front-end engineers on contracts. The role rewards depth, careful thinking, and a tolerance for unglamorous work like migrations and observability.
Back-end is the most expensive engineering role in the U.S. for a reason: the work compounds. The average U.S. Back-End Developer earns $10,000 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $2,800 per month, creating potential savings of up to 70%. LatAm has produced strong back-end talent for a decade, with serious bench depth in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
Yes. South contracts the engineer locally, handles compliance and payroll, and bills monthly. The engineer joins your GitHub, on-call rotation, and architecture reviews on day one. Time-zone alignment matters most for back-end work because incident response, deploys, and pair-programming all need real-time overlap. Hiring 12 hours offset is a tax that LatAm avoids.
Deep fluency in one server-side language, proven database design (relational and ideally one document store), API design, and an instinct for when to scale up vs. out. Senior candidates should be able to whiteboard a system from scratch, talk about tradeoffs (consistency vs. availability, sync vs. async), and walk through a production incident they led. Avoid candidates who can only build CRUD; you want someone who has shipped something hard.
Stack-dependent. Common combos: Node.js with Express or NestJS, Python with Django or FastAPI, Ruby with Rails, Go with stdlib, Java with Spring Boot, PHP with Laravel, .NET with ASP.NET. Add PostgreSQL or MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ or SQS, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS or GCP. Observability stack: Datadog, Sentry, Prometheus.
A Back-End Developer goes deeper. They will spend a week tuning a slow query, designing a new service boundary, or rewriting an auth flow. A Full-Stack Developer ships features faster across the stack but rarely owns infrastructure or scale problems. Hire Back-End when you have real systems work; hire Full-Stack when speed of feature delivery matters most.
South screens LatAm engineers with structured technical interviews, system-design rounds, and paid trial work when needed. You see a shortlist within ten days, run your interviews, and onboard in 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.
