Greelow — nearshore AI-native software development agency

Resource

The nearshore development guide

Twenty answers to the questions engineering leaders actually ask before committing to a nearshore partner. Written from thirteen years of contracts, engagements, and post-mortems.

Nearshore basics

What is nearshore development, exactly?

Nearshore development means contracting engineers who work in the same or an adjacent time zone as your team, typically in a different country. In the US context, nearshore almost always means Latin America — Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile — where the working day overlaps in full or near-full with US Eastern, Central, Pacific hours. This differs from offshore (India, the Philippines, Eastern Europe — 8 to 12 hours off) and onshore (a US-based hire on your payroll, or a US-based contractor). The reason the term exists at all is that timezone alignment is not an optional feature of the working relationship: standups, code reviews, and incident response all get materially harder when your senior engineer is asleep for two-thirds of your day. Greelow places engineers whose overlap with US business hours is functionally identical to a US-based hire — the two-hour offset between Buenos Aires and New York is smaller than the offset between New York and Los Angeles. The commercial trade-off is that nearshore rates are typically 40–65% of a US onshore hire's fully-loaded cost, without giving up the collaboration mechanics.

How does nearshore differ from offshore and onshore in practical terms?

The three models trade three things against each other: cost, timezone overlap, and communication overhead. Onshore hiring (US-based) gives you native timezone alignment and native English, but at $180K–$250K fully-loaded per senior engineer and a four-to-six-month time-to-hire. Offshore (India, Eastern Europe, the Philippines) gives you 30–60% of the cost, but with 8–12 hours of timezone offset that forces asynchronous work into every critical decision, and communication overhead that grows with the seniority of the role. Nearshore sits in between: 40–65% of the onshore cost, full or near-full timezone overlap, and English fluency that's testable in a technical interview. The practical difference shows up in the second month, not the first. In month one, everything works everywhere — the honeymoon holds. In month two, the offshore engineer misses a production bug because their standup happens after your team goes home; the onshore hire's salary lands, and your CFO asks why the new hire cost 3x your budget. The nearshore engineer joins your standup at 9:15 AM Eastern, ships a fix by lunch, and invoices at the same rate they did last month.

Why LATAM specifically, and not Poland or Ukraine?

Eastern Europe has legitimate engineering depth — Polish, Ukrainian, and Romanian senior developers are excellent. The reason we build our team in Latin America instead is entirely operational: timezone. Warsaw is six hours ahead of New York, seven ahead of Chicago, nine ahead of Los Angeles. A Polish senior engineer starts their day at what for a US team is late night; by the time your team is at their desk, the Polish engineer has three hours left before they log off. That mismatch pushes work asynchronous — which is fine for isolated tickets and unbearable for architecture discussions, code reviews, and incident response. Buenos Aires is one hour ahead of New York. Mexico City is one hour behind. Bogotá is on Eastern time. A senior engineer in Argentina joins the same 10 AM standup a New York PM does, has the same lunch break, and pushes their last commit at what for the US team is 5 PM. The engineering quality across Poland and Argentina is comparable. The daily collaboration mechanics are not. That's the reason. Secondary reasons — Spanish-English bilingualism is common in senior LATAM engineers, cultural affinity with US business norms is stronger, US LLC contracts are simpler than EU cross-border ones — reinforce the primary one but wouldn't be enough on their own.

What's the actual timezone advantage — and does it matter as much as people claim?

The answer depends on whether your engineering culture is synchronous or asynchronous. If your team runs deeply asynchronous — long-form written specs, code review as the primary review medium, decisions made in issue threads — the timezone advantage of nearshore over offshore is smaller. Some of the best remote engineering teams in the world work with 8-hour offsets and don't notice. If your team runs synchronous — standups matter, decisions get made in Slack in real time, incidents get triaged on a call — the timezone advantage is enormous. It's not that the offshore engineer is worse; it's that the offshore engineer participates in a different information stream. They miss the moment the head of product changes the requirements in the standup. They see the Slack thread the next morning, after the decision has been made, and either adopt it silently or push back a full day later. Multiply that by three months and the offshore engineer is building against a different version of the specification than the US team is. Nearshore removes that class of drift entirely. If you're not sure which culture your team runs, ask this: when a production incident hits at 11 AM Eastern, who is on the call? If the answer includes engineers you'd want to keep informed, nearshore is worth the extra 30% over offshore. If your incident response is fully async, the case is thinner.

Do LATAM engineers speak fluent English?

The senior ones we place, yes — and it's a gate, not a screening bonus. Every engineer we shortlist has passed a technical interview conducted in English. They participate in daily standups in English, write commit messages in English, review code in English, and are comfortable presenting architecture decisions to a US client's executive team in English. That level of fluency is not universal in the region — junior LATAM developers, and mid-level engineers who've worked exclusively for local Spanish-speaking companies, are often not there yet. Which is why the vetting is a gate. Greelow's talent-side experience is that roughly 15% of otherwise-qualified senior candidates fail the English fluency assessment; they don't make it into the shortlist we hand to you. The variance across LATAM countries is real but smaller than most people think. Argentine, Uruguayan, and Colombian senior engineers tend to have the strongest exposure to US business English (universities teach in English, tech companies operate in it). Mexican and Chilean senior engineers tend to have exposure through cross-border corporate work with US firms. The floor is comfortably above 'can work in English'; the ceiling is 'native-like fluency and cultural literacy about US business norms.' Your interview is where you calibrate to your specific communication requirements — some teams want native-like, some are fine with fluent-plus-accent, and both are represented in our talent pool.

Talent and hiring

How does Greelow vet its engineers?

Three passes, in this order: technical depth, communication, cultural fit for US remote work. Technical depth is where every engagement starts and where the bar is highest. Every candidate goes through a live technical interview conducted in English by a Greelow senior engineer, focused on a system they've actually built. Not a whiteboard problem — a real architecture from their last project. What did they choose, what did they trade off, what would they do differently. Candidates who can't defend architectural decisions in real-time don't make the cut, regardless of resume. The communication pass tests written and verbal fluency, but more importantly it tests decision-making mechanics: can they push back on a specification without being defensive; can they explain a technical trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder; can they say 'I don't know' when they don't know. The cultural-fit pass is the least formal and the most important. It looks for: autonomy (do they self-drive their own work when the PM is offline), responsibility (do they own their bugs, or attribute them elsewhere), collaboration (do they treat other engineers' code with respect). About 30% of technically-qualified candidates fail one of the two non-technical passes. Once an engineer is in our pool, we place them on client work by matching stack, seniority, vertical, and personality against your specific brief — not by broadcasting your role to everyone.

What seniority levels does Greelow place, and how are they defined?

Senior only. Practically, this means an average of eight or more years of production engineering experience, at least three years at a US or European company, and at least one production system they can walk you through in depth. We do not place junior or mid-level engineers. There is no rotation for revenue — the engineer who joins your team in month one is the same engineer in month twelve, unless you or they end the engagement. Within the 'senior' bucket, we distinguish four broad tiers. Senior (roughly 8–10 years) — the default; can own a workstream end to end, handle their own architecture decisions in a well-defined scope, and mentor junior engineers on your side. Staff (roughly 10–14 years) — cross-cutting, can influence architecture across multiple teams, comfortable in ambiguous scope. Principal (14+) — rare, expensive, and reserved for engagements where architectural authority is the primary need. AI Specialist — orthogonal to the seniority axis; production experience shipping LLM-integrated systems, RAG pipelines, MCP servers, or agentic architectures. When you tell us the role, we tell you which tier fits. The rate bands follow the tier: $4,000–$5,500 per month for a Senior, $5,500–$7,500 for Staff / Principal / AI Specialist. Custom quote for Fractional CTO plus squad shapes.

How do you verify daily AI-tool proficiency? Is that a real filter or a marketing claim?

It's a real filter and we can walk you through how it works. Every candidate we place has shipped production code that uses Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot as part of their daily workflow — not tools they've read about or tried on a side project. During the technical interview, we ask them to describe the last three times they used the tool to solve something real. What was the problem, what did they ask the tool, what did the tool suggest, what did they accept versus reject, and how did they know the tool was wrong when it was wrong. That last question is where the filter bites. An engineer who claims AI-native proficiency but can't articulate when their tools produce plausible-looking wrong answers has been using them shallowly. We're specifically testing for the engineer's calibration — do they understand the failure modes, do they know when to fall back to first principles, do they still write tests when the tool skips them. Beyond the interview, our talent-side operations run internal 'AI-ops' sessions where engineers demonstrate current techniques (MCP server integration, prompt-chain patterns for repeatable multi-step tasks, eval harnesses for LLM-integrated code) and rate each other. That's how the pool stays current with tool releases rather than freezing at 'I know Copilot exists.' If you want to test this yourself before or during your interview, ask a candidate to share their screen and refactor a moderately complex function using their AI tool. You'll see the calibration in five minutes.

What happens if an engineer isn't a good fit?

Thirty-day replacement guarantee, at no additional cost. Within the first month of any engagement, if the engineer we placed isn't meeting your expectations — technically, culturally, communication-wise — we replace them. New engineer, same rate, no fees. The clock resets on the new engineer. In practice, replacements are rare — under 5% of engagements trigger one — but the guarantee matters because it aligns incentives. We want to place engineers who work out, because a replacement costs us more than a stable engagement. After thirty days, either party can end the engagement with 30 days' notice. We don't do long-term lock-ins. If something isn't working past the first month, you're not stuck; if you decide the shape of your team needs to change, you're not stuck. Practically, most of our engagements run two to four years, which tells you something about the retention side of the equation — but the option to end at any 30-day boundary is there. We ask that you give us direct, honest feedback if things aren't going well. Most 'not a good fit' issues in the first thirty days come from scope drift or misaligned expectations rather than the engineer's capability; a candid conversation resolves them without a replacement. When a replacement is the right call, we do it fast — 48 hours from your green light to a new curated shortlist.

Can I interview candidates before they join my team?

Always. This is not negotiable on our side, either — we don't ship engineers you haven't spoken to. The standard flow is: discovery call (30 minutes) → we curate 2–4 real profiles that match your role → you interview them on your process. Your rubric, your questions, your call. If you want to run a two-hour system-design interview, do it. If you want a paid trial task, we can arrange it (typically a paid short project — the engineer bills for the hours). If you want your existing senior engineers to interview them, that works. The one thing we ask is that you commit to interviewing every profile we shortlist — three or four thirty-minute calls, not a resume-only screen. This is where we've seen the biggest quality gap between talent-marketplace placements and Greelow placements: a resume-only screen filters for keyword match, not the calibration and communication we spend our screening on. If your interview passes, the engineer joins. If it doesn't, we shortlist more. If none of the profiles feel right after two rounds of shortlists, we agree the role scope needs revisiting — sometimes what a client thinks they need is different from what they actually need, and the interview process surfaces that.

Cost and engagement

How much does nearshore development cost per engineer per month?

For Greelow specifically, the disclosed rate bands are: Senior (8+ years typical) $4,000–$5,500 per month; Staff / Principal / AI Specialist $5,500–$7,500 per month; Fractional CTO + Squad is a custom quote (typically 0.25–0.5 FTE fractional CTO plus 2–5 engineers, ranging $15K–$45K per month depending on shape). These are all-inclusive monthly rates — no separate line items for benefits, health, equipment, payroll, or compliance. For context, this puts Greelow's senior rate at roughly 45–55% of a US onshore hire's fully-loaded monthly cost (a US Senior at $180K salary lands at $22K–$25K per month once you add benefits, equity, taxes, equipment, and management overhead). It puts us at roughly 130–160% of typical Indian offshore rates ($2,500–$4,500 per month for equivalent seniority) — the delta is the timezone alignment and the fact that we don't rotate the engineer off your team quarterly. Broader nearshore market rates in Latin America range from $3,500 to $9,000 per month depending on country, seniority, and how the placement firm structures their margin. Greelow sits in the middle of that range with disclosed pricing on the site itself — which is uncommon in this market and worth calling out. Only about 4% of the 349 firms in a recent LATAM competitive sweep publish real rate bands publicly. We do it because opaque pricing lengthens sales cycles and filters for the wrong buyers.

What exactly is included in the monthly rate?

The short list: salary and taxes, benefits (health, retirement, vacation per Argentine or the placement country's labor law), health insurance, equipment (laptop, peripherals), payroll administration in the engineer's local currency, our management overhead, IP assignment and NDA paperwork, 30-day replacement guarantee. What that means for you: one flat invoice per engineer per month, in USD, from the Greelow LLC US entity. No separate charges for benefits at year-end, no equipment cost surprises when the laptop breaks, no invoices from an intermediate contractor. What's not included: third-party software licenses your team specifies (Figma seats, GitHub Enterprise, specialized IDEs, cloud provider costs) — those live on your side, and the engineer gets access through your normal seat provisioning. Also not included: travel to your offices, if you ever want that (rare — most engagements never have the engineer physically at your office). Travel gets billed separately at cost with a small coordination fee. When we send you the first proposal, the invoice line item is one row per engineer with the monthly rate. If we ever add a fee that isn't in the initial engagement letter — we don't — you'd see it broken out separately.

What's the minimum engagement duration?

Thirty days. That's the shortest engagement we take, and the mechanism is: the engineer starts, and either side can end with 30 days' notice at any point after that. In practice, we don't see many 30-day engagements — most clients don't hire a senior engineer for one month of work, and most senior engineers don't take a one-month engagement. The 30-day floor exists to keep the option to end open, not to serve as the typical shape. What is typical: 3-month initial engagement letters (essentially a way to formally review at month three), rolling into indefinite month-to-month with 30-day termination. About 80% of our engagements last more than one year. About 50% last more than two years. Some have run for six or seven years. The clients who keep engineers longest tend to be scaleup and mid-market SaaS companies where the engineer becomes part of the institutional knowledge — leaving becomes as expensive as it would for an internal hire. If you want to try before you commit, the 2-Week Fit Sprint is the productized entry — $8,000 flat, one senior engineer plus 0.25 architect, two weeks, one shipped feature plus an architecture note plus a decision call at the end to continue, adjust, or walk away. That's the shape we recommend for engagements where the buyer wants concrete signal before locking in a monthly engagement.

Are there setup fees, recruitment fees, or minimums?

None of the above. No setup fee. No recruitment fee. No signing fee. No monthly minimum beyond the single-engineer rate. This is a deliberate stance and it matters more than it looks. Traditional staffing firms and talent marketplaces charge either a placement fee (typically 20–35% of the annual rate as a one-time hit) or a platform fee (typically 10–20% of the hourly rate as an ongoing markup) or both. Both mechanisms convert to significant real money over a year — a $5,000 per month engineer at a 20% platform fee costs an extra $12,000 per year, and a $60,000-per-year Indian offshore engineer with a 30% placement fee costs an extra $18,000 in the first year alone. Our rates are what you pay. There's no separate margin layer or platform mechanic. The way this works commercially: we're a firm that employs the engineers directly (or contracts them under long-term agreements), so our margin is baked into the disclosed monthly rate rather than into a percentage of your spend. That's why we can be transparent about pricing — the math actually works at the disclosed number. A consequence: we're less flexible than a talent marketplace on the lowest end of pricing. We can't beat a $2,500-per-month offshore rate, because we can't pay a senior engineer that. We can and do beat opaque nearshore competitors on total year-one cost of engagement.

How does billing work — currency, entity, invoicing cadence?

Invoicing is monthly, in USD, from Greelow LLC (Florida). The invoice goes out on the first of the month for the month just ended (i.e., the invoice covering March goes out April 1st). Payment terms are net-15 by default, negotiable to net-30 for enterprise clients that require it. Accepted payment methods: ACH transfer (preferred, no fee), wire transfer (fee-bearing for you), corporate credit card via Stripe (fee-bearing for us, we pass through). We do not accept checks. The Greelow LLC entity is US-registered in Florida, which means: your accounting team receives a US-vendor invoice from a US-registered LLC, they issue a 1099 at year-end if that's how your accounting handles vendors, and there's no international-wire complexity for your finance team. This is a specific and deliberate structural choice — many nearshore firms invoice from their Argentine, Colombian, or Mexican entity, which triggers international-vendor paperwork on the client's side and often makes procurement more difficult. Invoicing through a US LLC bypasses all of that. For clients in Canada, EU, or elsewhere, we can invoice through appropriate entities where required; the default is the US LLC because most of our client base is US-based. If your team requires a specific line-item breakdown or a specific PO number on the invoice, tell us in the engagement letter and it goes on every invoice going forward.

Legal and compliance

Who owns the IP in a nearshore engagement?

You do — everything the engineer produces during the engagement is yours, transferred to you at creation. The mechanism: every engineer signs an IP assignment agreement before the engagement begins, which transfers ownership of all work product (code, documentation, designs, architectural decisions, everything else that would be copyrightable or patentable) to Greelow LLC. Greelow LLC then, under the client engagement letter, assigns that same work product to you. The effect is that the engineer's output flows through Greelow's structure and lands in your company's IP ownership before it ever enters your repository. This is stronger than a typical contractor arrangement, where the engineer retains implicit IP rights until an assignment is executed. Under our structure, there's never a moment where IP ownership is ambiguous. In practice, this shows up in three ways that matter. First, if you ever need to audit your codebase for third-party IP, the answer is clean — everything from a Greelow engineer is yours. Second, if a Greelow engineer later leaves and joins another company, they have no residual claim on the work they did for you. Third, if you ever raise investment or acquire your company, due diligence on your IP ownership passes without needing to trace individual contractor histories. The engagement letter also includes standard confidentiality clauses — everything the engineer sees during the engagement (your code, your product roadmap, your customer data, your architecture) stays confidential in perpetuity, not just during the engagement.

What certifications and compliance frameworks does Greelow hold?

Currently active: ISO 9001:2015 (quality management system, certified through 2027) — the certification means our internal processes for engineer vetting, project management, incident handling, and client communication are documented, audited annually by a third party, and consistent across engagements. In progress: ISO/IEC 42001 (AI management systems, the newer standard specifically for organizations that build or deploy AI systems). Anthropic Partner Network is in progress on the Claude specialization track. Not currently held: SOC 2 Type II — we're on a roadmap to add it once the client mix warrants the compliance overhead (SOC 2 costs roughly $30K–$50K annually and only pays off if enough of your client base requires it). We hold it as a mid-2027 target. Also not currently held: HIPAA, PCI-DSS Level 1, FedRAMP. These are compliance frameworks that apply to specific verticals (healthcare, payments, US federal) and Greelow has not yet had a client engagement that required us to hold them at the Greelow-entity level. Individual engineers we've placed have worked on HIPAA-regulated systems and PCI-regulated systems for our clients — the client held the certifications, the engineer worked within their compliance envelope. If you need Greelow itself to hold a specific certification for a particular engagement, tell us in the discovery call — we can price the compliance overhead as part of the engagement or route the engagement through a compliant sub-arrangement.

How does the US LLC contract structure work?

Greelow LLC is registered in Florida, USA (EIN 84-4474103), which means every client engagement letter is a US-to-US contract governed by Florida commercial law. What that unlocks for you: your legal team reviews the engagement letter as a US vendor contract, not as an international services agreement — the review is 20% of the time and 10% of the friction. Your accounting team files the vendor payment as a US 1099 vendor, without international-payment complexity. Your procurement team can use standard US vendor onboarding. Your data-protection team can evaluate our data handling as US-jurisdiction, which is often simpler than evaluating a nearshore-country jurisdiction. Under the hood, the engineer working on your project is employed by (or long-term contracted by) a Greelow-managed local entity in the engineer's country (Argentina, Colombia, or wherever the engineer lives). That local entity handles the engineer's local labor obligations — social security, income tax, vacation, health mandates. From your perspective, none of that touches you. Your only counterparty is Greelow LLC in Florida. The legal implication of this structure that matters: if you ever have a contract dispute, it's resolved in Florida under Florida law. That's a materially better dispute-resolution scenario than international arbitration through the engineer's home country. In fifteen years, we have never had a contract dispute reach that stage — but the structure is set up to make it clean if it ever does.

Delivery and onboarding

How fast can I have an engineer working after the discovery call?

The typical timeline from discovery call to engineer at their first standup on your Slack is one week. The breakdown: Day 1 — 30-minute discovery call. We come out of that call with a written role brief (stack, seniority, verticals, working hours, cultural fit criteria, engagement shape). If you already have that written and want to skip the call, we can — but most engagements benefit from the conversation because the written brief usually misses at least one important piece of context. Hours 1–48 — we curate 2–4 real profiles from our senior talent pool. Real names, real LinkedIn, real GitHub, real project histories, real rate proposals. Not resumes — profiles you can actually verify. Day 3-4 — you run your interview process on the candidates you shortlist. Your rubric, your questions, your call on the decision. If we've matched well, you interview 2–3 candidates and pick one. If we've matched poorly, you tell us why and we curate more. Day 5-7 — the chosen engineer signs the engagement paperwork on the Greelow side, gets set up on your tooling (we handle the Greelow-side onboarding; you provision the seats they need for your codebase, your Jira, your Slack, your standups), and joins their first standup. The one-week timeline holds for standard engagements — one senior engineer for an established role. Larger engagements (multi-engineer squad, or specialized profile like a lead architect) take longer because the profile-curation step is harder — typically 3–5 weeks for a squad, 4–6 weeks for a hard-to-find specialist.

What happens when an engagement ends?

Two paths, both cleanly documented. Path one: you initiate the end. Standard notice period is 30 days from written notification. During those 30 days, the engineer continues at their full rate and works on wind-down: writing handover documentation, transferring in-flight work to your team, walking your engineering leads through any architecture decisions that were still in the engineer's head. We ask that the wind-down be treated as a real deliverable, not a countdown to zero — a rushed handover is where you lose the accumulated context. On day 30, the engineer's access to your systems is revoked (by your team; we don't have the credentials to revoke), the final invoice is issued for that month, and the engagement is closed. Path two: the engineer initiates the end (leaves Greelow entirely, or leaves your engagement for another Greelow engagement). This is rare but does happen — senior engineers move for the same reasons anyone does. Greelow's obligation, and our commitment, is to give you replacement candidates at the same rate within 30 days of the notification, so you're never left without coverage. In both paths, the engineer's IP contributions stay with you — nothing they built during the engagement leaves with them. Confidentiality obligations continue in perpetuity. If you want to hire the engineer directly as a US employee (uncommon but does happen), we support that path with a one-time transition fee, typically 20% of the engineer's annual rate, negotiated per case. There's no non-compete or non-solicitation clause that would block it.

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