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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Companies selling technical products to technical buyers increasingly hire a Forward-Deployed Engineer — an engineer who sits with customers, solves their integration problems, and feeds what they learn back into the core product.
A Software Engineer designs, builds, tests, and ships software that powers a product or internal system. The title is broad on purpose: at one company it means a backend specialist working on distributed systems; at another it means a generalist shipping full features end to end. The constant is judgment under ambiguity. Good engineers don't just write code that works; they write code the next person can read, debug, and extend without filing a ticket.
An average U.S. Software Engineer earns $12,300 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $4,000 per month, creating potential savings of up to 67%. LatAm engineers regularly hold CS degrees from strong public universities (UBA in Argentina, USP in Brazil, UNAM in Mexico) and several years of remote U.S. team experience.
Yes. South contracts the engineer locally, handles compliance and payroll, and bills you monthly. They get GitHub access, on-call rotation, and Slack the same as a domestic hire. Time-zone alignment lets them pair, code-review, and ship in real time, which is the part most companies miss when they hire in EMEA or APAC.
Strong fundamentals in at least one language (Python, Java, Go, Ruby, C++, or TypeScript), data structure fluency, system design judgment, and the ability to debug production. Pair-program a real task in the interview if you can. The gap between top-tier and middle-tier engineers shows up most in how they decompose a vague problem, not in syntax.
Git and GitHub for source control, a CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or GitLab CI), Docker and Kubernetes for deploy, AWS, GCP, or Azure for cloud, PostgreSQL or MySQL for data, Redis for cache, and an observability stack (Datadog, Sentry, New Relic). Language-wise: Python, Go, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, or TypeScript depending on stack.
Most companies use the terms interchangeably, but in practice Software Engineer signals systems depth (backend, infra, distributed systems) while Full-Stack Developer signals product breadth (UI plus API plus data). Hire a Software Engineer when you're solving a hard technical problem and need someone who'll think about scale, reliability, and architecture. Hire a Full-Stack Developer when you need to ship product features fast and the technical complexity lives more in the integrations than the algorithms.
South vets LatAm candidates through structured interviews, paid work samples, and reference checks. 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 if the hire is not a fit. 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.
