Brian Samson on Hiring in Latin America 2026: Country Guide, Pricing & Nearshore Best Practices

Brian Samson (00:01.486)
I’m Brian Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies and host of the Near Shore Cafe podcast, where we talk about all things Latin America. Today, I want to talk about your 2026 hiring guide for Latin America. How to do this well, how to hire great talent from countries in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and more. A few things that we’re going to cover.

Number one, how do you do it? Where do you look? What does this cost? What are some best practices and what are some things that you should really try to avoid? So first, why is Nearshore all the rage? Well, we’ve seen really post COVID when time zones matter. This means Latin America is hotter than ever. We feel it.

when we’re working with teams on the other side of the world. Latin America is right in the time zone of the US. And even countries that jut out a little bit, like Argentina, they’re eating dinner really late. I’ve seen families walk into restaurants starting their meal at 11 o’clock at night, not finishing, starting with young kids too. It’s just cultural. You may not understand it or agree with it.

but it means that the workday is total overlap. So that’s number one and it’s huge. Number two, it’s not about price anymore. It’s about quality. Latin America as a region has over 2 million software engineers and a lot more tech adjacent people. They’re learning AI, they’re really strong quality. When you only focus on cost,

Maybe you could look at Asia, but more and more attention is time zone and high quality engineers. Then of course the leverage. You you’re working with a population that knows how to work with the US and you’re getting just massive multiples on your investment. The ROI is significant. So maybe you see you.

Brian Samson (02:25.272)
pay a little bit more than you would in Asia because you’ve got high quality, they know how to work with the US, they’re in all your meetings, you’re not missing deadlines, you’re not missing quality bars. Wow, I mean the return is fantastic and that’s why Latin America is on everybody’s minds right now.

But let’s talk little bit more about just like near shore versus offshore. Some of this is my opinion, but a lot of this is formed by customer opinions and conversations, engineering managers, VPs, founders, CEOs, CTOs. What are they saying? So offshore supermature, it’s been around for a long, time. You’ve seen

India really from the know the dot-com era going back to the late 90s That’s when a lot of this IT work started to happen Cognizant Infosys Tata, you know the names What has really? Just come into light though again is that time zone? So I’ve talked to so many engineering leaders Where they’re doing calls, you know at eight o’clock at night ten o’clock at night

I’ve also seen the opposite of maybe that team in India is working US hours, but that’s not sustainable. mean, maybe you could do the 3 a.m. coding for a year or two, but it burns you out. The rest of your family and friends are working the day shift, they’re awake during the sunshine. Kids’ schools are not at three o’clock in the morning. It just really wrecks your rhythm.

Now, what we also don’t talk about a lot is a lot of times we’re sharpest in the morning. So if we’re trying to adapt our schedules to accommodate an offshore team, so people tend to be the most critical thinking in the morning, but instead they’re in the middle of administrative work, the minutia, a million calls, setting priorities, scope.

Brian Samson (04:46.446)
And then the afternoon has to be their creative time. But that’s not when you’re sharp. You know, there’s a little after lunch. So get people on your time zone and you don’t have to worry about that. You know, the, um, the other thing is, uh, turnover. We see a lot more turnover in, uh, Asia and often, um, you know, just a little bit extra per hour. They’re onto the next project in Latin America. see.

dedicated, loyal, committed team members that are there for a long, long time. And then, you know, back to the pricing, you’ve got to build in rework, you’ve got to build in the cost of missing deadlines. So all these things are kind of driving away from offshore to near shore. We put several pods together that used to

be based in the Philippines, used to be based in India, and now they’re in Mexico or Argentina or Brazil. Companies really want better leverage, better return on their capital. Okay, so Latin America, that’s where the energy’s at, that’s where the excitement’s at. Let me talk about some of the key countries that you might be hearing about and what we like about.

Okay, so let’s start with Mexico. Over 100 million people are immediate neighbor. Many of you might have been to all-inclusive resorts in Cancun or places like that. But there’s so much more. There’s big cities like Mexico City, which is bigger than New York City. Guadalajara, which is like their Silicon Valley. Monterrey, Mexico, a ton of auto manufacturing, but also a lot of great technical talent.

is based there too. The proximity matters because they know US culture. A lot of them cross the border a lot back and forth. They do work, it’s easy to travel. They just understand US culture, US style, the way we talk. Just because you know English doesn’t mean you know US style English. And Mexico does this really, really well.

Brian Samson (07:09.742)
And because of their size, they can cover a lot of ground. I particularly like them for a lot of legacy technologies in QA. You need C sharp, .NET, Java, Mexico’s got you covered, QA, manual automation, Selenium, all that. Mexico’s got it in spades. OK. What if you needed a call center? This is where I’d like Nicaragua, BPO.

call center, back office, virtual assistants, really sharp, really hungry, energetic population that is right in sync with how we do business in the US. If you’re looking for a country with a lot of really good mid to senior level technical people, Columbia, right there, right next to

Mexico, Nicaragua, kind of close to all that action. So we’re talking about the northern part of Latin America so far. And Columbia is really producing, especially in their tech cities like Medellin, producing some really talented, creative software developers, especially in that SaaS world of Angular, React, Bootstrap, JS, really, really strong.

Let’s go further south. Brazil. Brazil has a very large population and a very exciting area called Florianopolis, which is created to drive a lot of AI, R &D, data engineers. So if you ask me, where do I find the best AI people in Latin America? Time and time again, it’s going to be Brazil.

And then Argentina, I’ve spent a lot of time there personally, and it’s got not only the legacy engineers, but there’s a lot of VC capital flooding into Argentina. And what does that mean? It means engineers that are building their own startups. And that matters if you’re looking to hire engineers for your tech company, because they get the culture, they understand the rhythms, the high pressure, the scope.

Brian Samson (09:34.988)
the scale, the users, the complexity. It’s a lot different from time and materials, engineer contracting. They’re putting their names on this thing, so they understand that ownership mentality. So those are the countries that I would really look at. know, honorable mention Peru, honorable mention Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile. There’s so many really exciting countries out there. Okay.

So how about the roles? We’ve talked about this a little bit, know, QA, we’ve talked about this with AI engineers, data engineers, software developers. But really anything that you could do remotely, you could do from Latin America. It’s just phenomenal. The internet has really stepped up there. There’s really strong internet. They’ve got all the AI tools that you could possibly need.

My only recommendations are kind of stay away from the extremes. It’s always good to have your executive team where your company headquarters is. And it’s always good to hire mid to senior level people because then you get the arbitrage. If you can get a senior person in Latin America for the cost of a junior person in the States, why not? That’s incredible arbitrage opportunity for you. So I very much steer you in that direction.

And then when you think about even directors, senior managers, there’s amazing leadership talent in Latin America. So you don’t need to micromanage everything. You hire a couple of really good leaders and pretty soon you can build a whole company from there. They know your culture, they keep people happy, keep morale up, keep productivity high. Really encourage you to take a look at that. Okay.

So what are some of the common mistakes that I’ve seen companies make?

Brian Samson (11:39.416)
They look at Latin America as a place for low cost resources. They throw work over the wall. There’s an us versus them mentality. Wrong. They are so locked in to the way we do business in the US. They’re so locked into US style culture. They’re watching the same Netflix movies that we are in English. They just get it. So why not build direct relationships with them?

Don’t work with agencies where there’s a lot of middlemen, architects, project managers, because you don’t need them. They’re just below overhead in your project. Treat them just like you treat anybody else. When you hire, really get to know them, get to know their families, their hopes, their dreams, their career goals. That’s all going to come into play. pricing. I’m sure a lot of you have been waiting for me to

hit on this one. What does it really cost? Okay, so let’s start with maybe a couple of different benchmarks. First, we’ve got Asia. Again, you’ll never beat Asia on price. But maybe you will when you factor in all the time zone issues, deadlines, rework, we covered that. So if you’re gonna hire in Asia on a DIY, do it yourself.

Yeah, sure. You can get bottom barrel talent for a couple dollars an hour and you can pat yourself on the back for that. But are you really getting all the value that you need? There’s cheap, cheap, then there’s value hiring. That’s what I want to hit on today is value hiring. So in San Francisco, companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on software developers. Why?

because that software developer can create millions of dollars of return. Okay. You’re always looking for that type of ROI, that type of arbitrage. If you’re hiring people for a couple of dollars an hour, it’s hard to expect millions of dollars in return. Maybe it’s thousands of dollars in return and it’s just, you you, you want to, you want to look for big ROI. This is what makes Latin America special.

Brian Samson (14:04.458)
If you’re finding somebody or you’re expecting like $3,000 a month for an engineer in Latin America, yeah, you can find that. Are they the best engineers in Latin America? No. You’re probably going to see price points, especially if you use a recruiting firm or agency, somewhere between $6,000 to $9,000 a month. That’s kind of the reasonable range to expect. And why it might be increasing to the $8,000, $9,000.

seeing a little bit more demand, but also these are top quality, hardcore engineers, AI, data engineers, closure, complicated skill sets that, if you don’t see a lot of them in the States, you don’t see a lot of them in Latin America, supply and demand that drives the price up. Java, QA, it’s going to be more on that low end, but you’re here for ROI.

you’re here for a multiplier effect. And if you pay $6,000 a month, that’s about 70K a year. And again, that’s all inclusive. You don’t have to worry about benefits, taxes, all that. A company like Plugg would handle everything south of the border. You don’t have to worry about any of that. Okay, so hundreds of thousands of dollars in the States, single dollar an hour in Asia.

Somewhere, you know in that six to nine thousand dollar monthly price in Latin America But good enough to generate millions of dollars in return That’s where I think you’re you’re smart enough to know that if you’re watching this podcast That you should be looking for value and arbitrage Okay Last thing I’m gonna get into is scaling. So how do you do this? How do you build a team in Latin America?

The first thing that I would lean into is hire one or two amazing people, let them cook, understand how this all works. I wouldn’t do 20 people tomorrow, hire one or two really good senior people that maybe have leadership potential. You probably do the same thing if you were a New York company and hiring in Atlanta, you might not do 50 people the first month.

Brian Samson (16:30.572)
Maybe you do a couple of really strong ones to test out the case, make sure it all works, there’s good cultural alignment, you pick the right country, all that. And then referrals matter big time in Latin America. Institutional credibility. By the way, if you tried to hire 50 people and you’re an unknown in Latin America, it might be difficult. They’re looking all the time at companies they can trust, people they can trust.

It’s high trust society, you they want to be able to trust you. So with all that said and done.

Consider Latin America as the place to build your company. You can get everything here from leaders, senior developers, marketing managers, back office, BPO. You just want to look at different countries for different things. They all have talent pockets. Plugg Technologies is here to help and advise you. And we’ll walk you through all the different constraints. Even things you might not be thinking about, like customs, tariffs.

getting sophisticated MacBooks and other hardware to these countries. It’s not always as easy as you might assume, but we’ve been doing this for a long time and we can guide you through everything. Thanks again for listening to the Near Shore Cafe podcast. I’m your host, Brian Samson, and also the founder of Plugg Technologies, where we’ve made over 500 placements of long-term talent from Latin America.

for US companies. You can find Plugg at plugg.tech. See you again soon. Thank you.