Hiring Engineers Across Europe: The Second Country Is Where It Goes Wrong

The first European Engineering hire usually goes fine.

Someone on the team knows someone, or the market is close enough to home that the process you already run still works.

It is the second country that catches people out.

By then there is a plan on a slide. Three engineers in Berlin by Q2, two in Lisbon after that. The plan quietly assumes the second country will behave like the first one did, and it almost never does.

Here is what actually slows it down, in the order it tends to bite.

Notice periods will eat your timeline before anything else does

This is the biggest single gap between a European hiring plan and a European hiring reality.

In the UK, a month is normal and three months is senior. In Germany, three months to the end of a quarter is standard and six is not unusual. The Netherlands sits at one to two. Poland varies by contract type.

So a plan that reads “three Engineers in Berlin by the end of Q2” needs the offers signed at the start of Q1, not Q2. Teams that miss this do not find out in week two. They find out in week nine, when the person they have just convinced to join mentions their end date and the room goes quiet.

Build the plan backwards from start dates, not from offer dates. It changes which markets you go to first.

Your salary band is not one band, it is five

Engineering salaries across Europe vary more than most first-time expansion plans allow for, and not always in the direction you expect. Amsterdam and Munich sit far closer to London than a spreadsheet built on cost-of-living indices suggests. Lisbon and Warsaw are genuinely lower, but the senior end of both markets has been bid up hard by remote-first companies paying somewhere between local and Western European rates.

The failure mode is setting one European band, discovering it is uncompetitive in the market you most wanted, and then spending three weeks getting an exception approved while your best two candidates take other offers.

Set the band per market before you open the search. Ask your recruiter for real offer data rather than survey data, because survey data lags by about a year and a year is a long time in this market.

Equity does not travel

An Engineer in London or Dublin has probably worked somewhere with options and has a rough sense of what they are worth. An Engineer in Munich or Stockholm may have had options explained to them once, badly, and may have watched a friend get taxed on paper gains they never realised.

Tax treatment genuinely differs. In some markets options are taxed at grant or at exercise rather than at sale, which turns a perk into a liability. If your offer leans on equity to close the gap on cash, and you have not checked how it is treated locally, you are making an offer that looks generous to you and risky to them.

Either explain it properly, in writing, in terms of the local tax position, or weight the offer towards cash in markets where equity is not understood. Do not assume enthusiasm will carry it.

You are competing with companies you have never heard of

In your home market you know your competition. You know which companies pull from the same pool, what they pay, and what they are like to work for, so you know how to position against them.

In a new market you have none of that. The strongest local employer brand in Warsaw or Copenhagen is often a company with no profile at all outside its own country, and candidates will weigh your Series B SaaS company against it on stability, not on ambition.

Which means your pitch has to change. Being a fast-growing venture-backed company is a differentiator in some markets and a risk signal in others. Ask candidates in the first conversation what else they are looking at. The names will tell you more about how to run the search than any market report.

The interview process that worked at home will lose you people abroad

Five rounds and a take-home is survivable when candidates are used to it. In markets where two or three conversations is the norm, it reads as either disorganised or arrogant, and the good candidates simply stop replying rather than complain.

The fix is not to lower the bar. It is to compress the process. Combine the technical screen and the system design conversation. Make the take-home optional with a live alternative. Decide within forty eight hours.

We run an eight to one CV-to-hire ratio across our engineering searches, and a large part of that is doing the filtering before the client process starts rather than using client interview slots to do it. That matters more in Europe than anywhere, because you cannot ask someone to take four half-days off work in a market where they will not get them back.

Decide how you are employing people before you talk to them

Most companies making their first one or two hires in a new country use an employer of record, then move to a legal entity once the headcount justifies it. That is a reasonable path. The mistake is not choosing it before the search, because it comes up in the first conversation and “we are still working that out” is a bad answer to give a senior engineer.

It also changes what you can offer. Some employer of record arrangements complicate equity, pension contributions or notice terms. Find out before you are two weeks from an offer.

What to do differently on the second country

Work backwards from start dates. Set the salary band per market using real offer data. Check the local tax treatment of your equity before you lean on it. Ask candidates who else they are talking to. Cut a round out of the process. Settle the employment model first.

None of that is complicated. It is just the part that gets skipped because the first hire went smoothly and nobody wanted to slow down.

If you are planning European engineering hires now and want a view on which markets will actually move at the pace you need, that is the conversation we have most often. There is more on how we run those searches on our tech recruitment agency for Europe page.