Brian Samson on Nearshore Salaries in Latin America: Developer, QA & AI Engineer Rates by Country

Brian Samson (00:01.334)
Welcome to the Nearshore Cafe Podcast. I’m your host, Brian Samson, and I’m also the founder of Plugg Technologies, the sponsor of the show. But I have 11 years working in Latin America, building teams, building companies. I lived in Buenos Aires. I’ve been to the major tech cities all throughout Latin America. I’ve seen how teams are put together.

What stuff cost? Contractors, W-2 type employees, mid-level developers, juniors, senior leads, the cost of teams, the cost of individuals. So on this show, I just want to give it to you straight. What do people cost? All right, so let’s start with the premise. I’m going to talk about types of roles, then I’m going to talk about seniority, and then I’m going to talk about locations.

So types of roles. On the back end side, you’ve got some legacy like Java.NET. You know, occasionally maybe you’ll see like C sharp or something, but that’s that’s pretty legacy. so we’ll stick to Java.net. the more modern side, you know, you’ve got full stack developers, Angular, React, Bootstrap, you know, modern type of technologies.

Salesforce administrators and Salesforce developers, DevOps, you’ve got AI engineers, data engineers, data scientists, QA, both manual and automation, and then project managers and business analysts. So that might not cover every single role, but it covers a lot that people might near shore. And then we’ve got some of the major

countries, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua. And I know there’s more countries in Latin America, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, and so forth. so there’s going to be some opportunity to make logical leaps and assumptions based on this standard data that I’m gonna give.

Brian Samson (02:28.555)
Okay, so generally speaking, I think Mexico is like a midpoint priced country. I think Brazil and Argentina, for at least for tech talent, are on the more expensive side. Costa Rica is more on the expensive side. Colombia is a little bit under. I think Nicaragua is more significantly under market. And of course, you’re gonna find exceptions.

And what I love about the way the world is shifting towards is great talent is getting connected to great companies and wages are converging. so in a way, like the best talent is paid regardless of country. But this podcast is meant to be like the the general rule of thumb for what talent might cost. Okay, so let’s get into some real numbers here.

If you’re looking at now, this is if you were to go direct and try to hire somebody, because I also want to remove any like wild, irrational assumptions, like you could find a software engineer for $6 an hour because they’re outside the US. Nope, not correct. Honestly, you probably can’t even find that in Southeast Asia anymore. But Latin America, you’re going to

Probably be starting at several thousand dollars a month, period, for even a junior engineer. So call it, you know, $2,000 is like the minimum amount that you pay. And six figures per year. so call it, you know, what is that, like $8,000 a month, $9,000 a month. That might be like towards the ceiling of a seniorslash lead engineer. And then, you know.

The factors that increase the price are the complexity of the role and the location. And sometimes those go hand in hand. Like, I probably would recommend you look at Brazil for a senior data engineer. and again, complex role, hard-to-find role, and a more expensive country. So therefore, you’re gonna be on the upper end of the range. if you’re looking at, you know, say call center.

Brian Samson (04:49.133)
In a more developing country, you know, like say Guatemala, that’s going to be on the lower, lower end, you know, so maybe even under $10 an hour. and again, that’s without recruiting fees. And a company like Plugg does charge fees on top of that. and hopefully we’re adding value, you know, in terms of advising you on the right country.

finding this talent that maybe you wouldn’t be able to find or connect with on your own, handling the hardware, handling the payroll, handling the onboarding. Again, you know, none of these are are easy to do. Okay. So that’s where companies like Plugg and our competitors try to add the value. Okay. So we’ve got this wide range, $2,000 a month to $8,000 a month for technical roles. So you’re

Mid-level Java developer, you know, probably two to four thousand dollars a month. And then senior, you’re probably, you know, into the four to six thousand dollars a month range. dot net, maybe marginally less expensive. For full stack developers, you’re probably four thousand to maybe even up to eight thousand dollars a month because you’re probably going to a country like Argentina to get access to that.

And as a result, Argentina also has really excellent English skills, which factors into the rates. We often tell our candidates: if you really want to get a bump in pay, master English, because that is something highly valued by customers. So somewhere between you know four to seven thousand per month for that full-stack developer. For the Salesforce admins, a little less expensive than developers.

We’ve had a lot of success in Mexico. we’ve built multiple pods of teams as companies have actually moved from the Philippines to Mexico. so remember the Philippines is cheaper, but you’re moving to Mexico for value, not cheap, cheap, but you want ROI, you want value. So generally $4,000, $5,000 a month is kind of the min minimum.

Brian Samson (07:11.789)
And then it goes up to five, six, seven thousand dollars a month, depending on seniority, leadership, complexity. DevOps, you might not need a full-time DevOps person anymore. So they’re often on a fractional basis per hour. You’re looking at 50, 60, even higher per hour. AI, data engineers, data scientists, again, you’re probably looking at Brazil. That’s the higher end, you know, budget for.

seven, eight, nine thousand dollars a month. QA engineers, manual, obviously much cheaper, you know, maybe $15, $20 an hour. That’s like three to four thousand dollars a month. Automation, we really really look at those as like backend engineers. So very similar to the Java developer salaries that we quoted. project managers, business analysts, PMs are a little bit more usually than than VAs, but you’re looking at, you know,

Four thousand dollars a month maybe is like the midpoint. It could go up to six, seven thousand dollars a month based on seniority, domain experience, you know, that really matters, English fluency, you know, and there’s there’s a lot that goes into the skill set. And again, you know, there’s a seniority matrix and there is a country matrix. Brazil, Argentina again on the high side, Mexico is your midpoint, Colombia.

And Central America, you know, start to get a little bit lower. So hopefully you found this helpful. And again, we we try to give some real numbers here, not just say Latin America is 40% or 70% cheaper. And the last thing I’ll lead with, I’ll end with, is ROI. This is why I’ve spent the last 11 years working within Latin America because I get the best return on investment here.

And our clients get the best return on investment. So instead of the 300k salary in San Francisco, maybe you’re still paying $120,000 to somebody in Argentina, but that person is generating millions of dollars in business value. That’s why we like Argentina. The scrappiness, the curiosity, the critical thinking, the cleverness, the problem solving ability, the

Brian Samson (09:37.101)
Enthusiasm that they use to approach problems, that is worth a tremendous amount of value. So, could you get somebody in India for $12 an hour or the Philippines or Vietnam? Absolutely. But if you’re really looking for value in ROI, that’s where I’d recommend Latin America and be prepared to pay somewhere in the middle between the US salaries and Southeast Asia.

That’s all for this episode. Again, I’m your host, Brian Samson. Operating in this industry and this part of the world for 11 years. And you can contact me anytime to get very specific about your role, what you need, hardware, are you scaling, and everything in between. Thanks for listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast.