Pick onshore when the work legally or practically requires people in the United States: on-site presence, export-controlled or government data, or contracts that restrict where work is performed. Pick nearshore when the work is remote-friendly and you want engineers on US business hours at a lower monthly cost than US hires, with a large Latin American talent pool to draw from. For most remote product and AI engineering, the two models collaborate almost identically, so the decision comes down to restrictions and budget.
Onshore is the right answer when location is a requirement, not a preference.
Nearshore fits when the work is remote anyway and the goal is more senior capacity on the same hours.
We won't quote US market salaries here, because they vary sharply by city, role and seniority, and any single number would mislead you. The useful comparison is fully loaded: what each option costs per month once you include recruiting time, recruiter or agency fees, onboarding, tooling and the management time spent hiring.
For nearshore through Ryz, the numbers are fixed per person. Mid-level engineers, comparable to Amazon L5 or SDE II, are typically $7,000–$10,000 per month. Senior engineers, comparable to Amazon L6, are $10,000–$15,000 per month. Leads are $15,000 and up, quoted per team. A team of three senior engineers and a lead for one year is the sum of those monthly rates times 12; for the seniors alone that is $360,000–$540,000. See the cost to hire a software developer for the onshore side of the math and our calculator to model your own team.
Because both models share US working hours, day-to-day collaboration looks the same. The differences show up in four places.
Onshore engineers can be in the office on short notice. Nearshore engineers can travel for planning weeks, launches or onboarding, and many Latin American cities have direct flights to Miami, Houston, Atlanta and New York, but daily on-site presence is not realistic.
This is the hard line. If a regulation or customer contract restricts access by location or nationality, nearshore is out for that workload. Many companies split the work: restricted systems stay with onshore staff, while the rest of the product is built with a nearshore team under normal access controls.
For unrestricted work, the controls are the same in both models: SSO, least-privilege access, managed devices, code review and audit trails in your own systems. Engineers with experience working within HIPAA, PCI DSS or SOC 2 controls matter more than their location. Ask how a provider handles access provisioning and offboarding.
The US market has the deepest pool of people who have built at very large scale, and also the most competition for them. Latin America has large, mature engineering communities, many engineers with years on US-based teams, and less competition for senior people from any one US employer.
We provide nearshore engineers and teams. Senior Latin American engineers work on your team, on US business hours including New York hours, in your repos and standups, with real-time overlap with US teams. Fortune 500 engineering teams trust us, and only the top 1% of the tens of thousands of engineers we interview make it. Start with staff augmentation for individual engineers, a dedicated development team for a full squad, or AI pod teams for AI systems that ship to production.
If you need a permanent onshore hire instead, our direct-hire placement and executive search covers remote and on-site roles. If a workload must stay with US persons, keep it onshore.
For comparable seniority, generally yes. Compare fully loaded cost, including recruiting time and fees, onboarding and management time, rather than base pay alone. With Ryz, senior engineers are typically $10,000–$15,000 per month and mid-level engineers $7,000–$10,000.
They should, but confirm it. Most Latin American engineering hubs sit between US Central time and two hours ahead of New York, so a normal local workday overlaps most of the US day. Ask any provider to commit to your core hours in writing.
For most regulated work, such as healthcare or payments data, yes, with the same access controls you apply to any remote engineer. Where a law or contract restricts access to US persons or US locations, such as ITAR-controlled data, keep that workload onshore.
For planned visits such as kickoffs, planning weeks or launches, often yes, subject to travel logistics. For daily on-site work, choose onshore.
Often, for long-term heads of function who work closely with executives. Tech leads and engineering managers for a specific team can work well nearshore, especially when the team they lead is nearshore too.
Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.
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