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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Hire a UX designer from Latin America who ships polished, usable product in your time zone and costs 30 to 53% less than a US hire. South places full-time, pre-vetted UX designers with SaaS, fintech, and e-commerce teams in about two to four weeks, with no large upfront fees and a relationship you own directly.
A UX designer is a product professional who researches user needs, structures information and flows, and designs interfaces that are intuitive to use. They turn ambiguous problems into wireframes, prototypes, and tested designs, balancing user goals against business and technical constraints to make products people can navigate without friction.
The discipline spans a wide arc, from understanding the problem to delivering pixel-level specs. On the research side, a UX designer runs user interviews, synthesizes findings, maps journeys, and identifies the real pain points behind a feature request. On the design side, they produce information architecture, low-fidelity wireframes to validate flows fast, and high-fidelity mockups and interactive prototypes that engineering can build from. The best UX designers close the loop with usability testing, watching real users attempt tasks and iterating based on where they stumble. This research-to-test cycle is what separates UX design from visual design; a UX designer is accountable for whether the product actually works for people, not just whether it looks good.
Figma is the center of the modern UX toolchain, used for wireframing, high-fidelity design, prototyping, and collaboration. Designers also work in tools like Maze or UserTesting for usability research, Miro or FigJam for journey mapping and workshops, and Dovetail for synthesizing research. A strong UX designer builds and maintains design systems, the reusable component libraries and tokens that keep a product consistent and let teams ship faster, and works fluently with engineers in a handoff process that includes specs, states, and edge cases.
UX design overlaps with adjacent roles, and the boundaries vary by company. At some organizations the UX designer also handles visual polish, blending into a UX/UI designer or product designer role. At larger companies, research may be split off to a dedicated UX researcher. What stays constant is the core mandate: understand users, design flows that serve them, validate the work, and partner with product and engineering to ship. UX designers also need a working grasp of accessibility standards like WCAG, because designing for all users, including those with disabilities, is both an ethical baseline and increasingly a legal requirement.
The clearest trigger is shipping product without dedicated UX. If engineers or a product manager are designing screens between other responsibilities, you are getting interfaces that technically function but frustrate users, drive support tickets, and quietly cost conversions. The first dedicated UX designer often pays for themselves by fixing the friction that was leaking customers, especially in conversion-sensitive products like e-commerce checkout or fintech onboarding.
Scale is another driver. As a product grows, inconsistency creeps in: every feature looks slightly different, patterns diverge, and the experience fragments. A UX designer who builds and enforces a design system restores coherence and speeds up future work. If your team is spending time rebuilding the same components over and over, you need this.
Usability problems are the third trigger. If you have data showing users dropping off at specific steps, failing to complete key tasks, or flooding support with confusion, a UX designer who researches the why and redesigns the flow is the direct fix. Guessing at solutions without research wastes engineering cycles; a UX designer brings rigor.
Who should not hire yet: a very early-stage startup still searching for product-market fit with a tiny user base may not need a full-time UX designer. At that stage, a founder with design sense plus occasional contract help often suffices, and the priority is learning fast, not polishing. Hire a dedicated UX designer once you have real users, real usage data, and a product surface large enough to keep a designer busy. Be honest about your stage. Premature UX hires can over-design before you know what to build.
The portfolio is everything, but read it correctly. Weak portfolios show only beautiful final screens. Strong ones show process: the problem, the research, the explored alternatives, the decisions and tradeoffs, and the measured outcome. Look for case studies where the designer explains why they made choices and what happened after launch. A designer who can articulate why they rejected an approach is more valuable than one who just presents a pretty result. Green flags: evidence of user research, iteration based on testing, and a clear connection between design decisions and user or business outcomes.
Test Figma fluency directly. Ask a candidate to walk through a real file or complete a short exercise. You want to see clean component structure, proper use of auto layout, and prototyping that demonstrates interaction thinking. A designer who is genuinely fast in Figma ships more; one who fights the tool slows the whole team.
Probe research and accessibility depth. Ask how they have run usability tests and what they changed as a result. Ask how they handle WCAG requirements. These reveal whether the candidate is a true UX practitioner or primarily a visual designer who calls themselves UX.
Red flags: a portfolio that is all aesthetics and no reasoning, inability to explain design decisions, no real research experience, dismissiveness toward accessibility, and poor communication, since UX designers must constantly align with product and engineering. The best UX designers are curious, opinionated but collaborative, and obsessed with whether the thing they built actually works for users. They take feedback well and defend good decisions with evidence rather than ego.
The savings here are significant because US UX salaries are high. A full-time US UX designer typically costs around 9,000 dollars per month, often more in tech hubs and before benefits, equity, and overhead. An equally skilled designer hired through South from Latin America runs around 4,200 dollars per month, a savings of roughly 53%.
At a glance:
This reflects cost of living, not capability. Latin America has a deep, sophisticated design community, designers trained on the same tools, following the same thought leaders, and shipping for global companies. A salary that is highly competitive in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, or Bogota still costs a US company roughly half of a domestic hire. The designers South places have real portfolios of shipped product and fluency in Figma, research methods, and design systems. You are paying less because of geography and currency, not because the work is junior. On a single senior UX seat, the annual savings often exceed 50,000 dollars, which for many teams funds an additional engineer or another designer.
Time zone overlap is what makes LatAm UX talent so much more effective than offshore alternatives. Design is collaborative and iterative, full of real-time critiques, pairing with engineers, and quick syncs with product. A designer in your time zone joins those conversations live, where one eight or twelve time zones away turns every exchange into a next-day delay. Latin American designers work US hours and are present in your standups, design reviews, and Slack threads.
English fluency is strong across the region's design and tech community, many designers have worked with US and European companies and present comfortably in English. That matters for a role built on communication: articulating decisions, facilitating research, and aligning stakeholders.
Talent depth is real and growing. Latin America has produced a generation of designers working at global product companies and agencies, fluent in modern UX practice, design systems, and the Figma-centered workflow. The community is active, with strong local design scenes in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.
Retention is the compounding benefit. Because South places full-time, dedicated designers at salaries that are excellent locally, the people you hire tend to stay and grow with your product. A UX designer who learns your domain, your users, and your design system becomes far more valuable in year two than year one, exactly the continuity you want, at roughly half the cost of keeping that knowledge in a US seat.
South sources and vets so you only meet designers worth interviewing. We review portfolios for real process and shipped outcomes, test Figma fluency and research depth, and screen for English communication and collaboration, then present a short slate matched to your domain and product needs. You interview, you choose, and your designer works full-time and dedicated to your team, embedded in your tools and rituals.
Placement typically takes about two to four weeks. There are no large upfront fees. South runs on a straightforward monthly model, and you own the relationship with your designer directly. They are a member of your product team, not a contractor rotated behind a vendor wall.
If you are shipping product without dedicated UX, or your experience is fragmenting as you scale, book a call with South. We will match you with vetted Latin American UX designers who work your hours and start improving your product within weeks.
A full-time, dedicated UX designer from Latin America through South costs around 4,200 dollars per month, compared to roughly 9,000 dollars for a comparable US hire. That is up to 53% in savings, with no large upfront fees. The exact rate depends on seniority, domain experience, and specialization.
Most placements happen in about two to four weeks from your first call. South maintains a pre-vetted pipeline of design talent, so you can have a UX designer embedded in your team and contributing quickly.
Yes. Latin America has a deep, sophisticated design community working with the same tools, methods, and standards as US designers, many at global product companies. South vets for real portfolios of shipped work, Figma fluency, and genuine research and design-system experience.
Yes. Latin American designers work US business hours, so they join your design critiques, engineering handoffs, and standups live. That real-time collaboration is critical for an iterative discipline like UX and is a major advantage over offshore options many time zones away.
A UX designer focuses on research, flows, usability, and interaction. A product designer often spans UX plus visual design and works more closely with product strategy. The boundary varies by company; some roles blend both. South helps you scope the exact mix you need.
If you need someone to both design and validate, a UX designer covers both. If you have a large research workload or want dedicated research rigor, a UX researcher specializes in interviews, testing, and synthesis. Many teams start with a UX designer who does both, then split the roles as they scale.
Every South placement is full-time and dedicated to your team. Your designer is not split across clients. They learn your domain, your users, and your design system, and work exclusively for you.
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.
