Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 158 handpicked jobs: 116 relocation-friendly positions and 42 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,800+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 22 roles (incl. 9 remote)

• Front End – 6 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Full Stack – 15 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Mobile – 6 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 28 roles (incl. 10 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 9 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Data & AI – 19 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 14 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Security – 8 roles

• Gaming – 4 roles

• Embedded Development – 3 roles

• Product – 7 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Design – 8 roles

• Other – 9 roles (incl. 4 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (150+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

Could you briefly introduce yourself and explain how you got into software engineering and iOS development?

I remember this was in 2016, about 10 years ago. I was in my last year of college, and I had just gotten an iPhone. Back in India, it was a big deal. I was always curious about the apps that I used, like, hey, what happens when you click a button? What’s the stuff underneath?

I took a course on Udemy. I guess it was iOS 8 or 10 or something back then. There was this one Friday night when I had just come back from college and was midway through the course. I was so into it that I spent the entire night on it and didn’t realize it was already morning.

I was studying information technology in college, but what we were learning was very general and didn’t really interest me that much. The practical stuff was much more interesting. The main thing about front-end development is that you do something, you write code, and you can immediately see the output. With back-end development, it’s more difficult to see the output. That was something that was interesting to me and got me into iOS development.

At that point, I was also thinking about doing my master’s in the USA, but somehow I didn’t go ahead with it. I thought that maybe staying in India and working toward a startup might be a better opportunity at the time. So, my first experience was actually a startup with a few friends. It was called PetOye, and it was for pets, dogs and cats. Basically, it was related to grooming services, food, and stuff like that. We were a bit more focused on the technology side rather than going out into the actual market and talking to vendors because we all came from technology backgrounds and didn’t have experience with that side of things. Eventually, it died down because we were still very young and didn’t have the patience to keep going.

I worked on the iOS app and also a bit on the backend. After that, I did some freelancing as well. One important lesson I learned from freelancing was that whatever you deliver needs to be as close to the requirements as possible because the freelancing market is very brutal. If you don’t do it like that, you don’t get paid. When you work for a company, you can sometimes cut corners and still get paid. But freelancing taught me that even a one-pixel difference can be a big difference.

How different is the international job market in 2026?

You started your career in a very different tech market. How difficult did the international job market feel when you started looking abroad compared to five years ago?

In 2020, just after the pandemic started, I wasn’t looking at the international job market, but even in the local market, a lot of recruiters were reaching out: Uber, Deliveroo, and other big companies in India. I kind of ignored them. Now when I look back at that, I’m like, wow, how stupid I was to ignore those opportunities. But those were the golden times.

When I was researching the international job market in 2025 and 2026, what I used to do was look at people who were expats in foreign countries and see when they actually relocated. Most of them had relocated in 2020 or 2021. It was very difficult to find someone who had relocated in recent times. I was still able to find a few, but the numbers were very, very low. That was disappointing because it showed me the reality of the market.

Another interesting thing was that in India in 2025, I was working as some sort of software lead, like a team lead or tech lead. So initially, I was looking for engineering manager roles. That was much more complicated than applying for software developer roles because there are very few EM roles. What I realized is that European companies generally aren’t looking for EMs in external markets because they can fill those roles in their local or EU markets. The first few months of my search were mostly about applying for EM roles. Then I had to pivot back toward software development and senior software developer roles.

Andrew’s comment:

I have exactly the same feeling when it comes to the digital footprint of tech relocation. Most of what you find online is frozen somewhere around 2021–2022: relocation stories, interviews, Reddit threads from people choosing between three job offers in Berlin, companies proudly talking about relocating engineers. The market changed significantly after that, but a lot of software engineers are still looking at that old picture. One reason I wanted to publish Ameya’s story is simply to give more examples of what finding a job abroad actually looks like in 2026.

What did your actual job search look like?

I started passively applying around May or June 2025. I was completely new to the international market, naive, and didn’t really know what I was doing. At that point, I was mostly applying for Engineering Manager (EM) roles, very passively, and I didn’t know which companies sponsored visas.

In July, I got an interview at N26. I had applied through a referral, which maybe was a big reason why I got the interview. I went through the recruiter round, but then they said they couldn’t sponsor a visa for this particular role. At that point, I had already trained my mind to expect rejection emails. So when I actually saw an email saying I had been selected for the next round, I couldn’t believe it. Even getting that first interview felt like a big win.

After that rejection, I felt dejected and didn’t apply for maybe a month. Then I started again. In September, I had another opportunity with Voodoo in France. I had applied for one of their roles, but they contacted me about another role at the same company. They wanted someone who was good at SwiftUI. I lacked some experience with SwiftUI, and the recruiter mentioned that the interview rounds were quite difficult, so I didn’t end up going through the interview process.

Around that time, I realized that I needed to pivot much more toward senior software developer roles. There were maybe 10 software developer roles for every one EM role, so I decided I needed to bite the bullet, target senior software developer roles, and maybe revisit EM roles further down the line.

From October to December, I stopped applying completely. I was preparing. I had noticed a gap in my data structures and algorithms knowledge. At work, I was also doing a lot of managerial work and not actually coding, so I started working on a side project when I came home to refresh my coding skills and gain more confidence before interviews. My data structures knowledge was very weak, and that was one of the main reasons I wasn’t applying to big companies. I wanted to address that first.

Then in January 2026, I had an opportunity with adjoe from Germany. They were hiring a mobile tech lead, so it was a very good fit. I went through several rounds with them. Looking at the whole search, I have honestly lost track of the exact number of applications, but it was maybe around 200. Around six or seven companies reached out. I had first rounds with almost all of them, and around three went to further rounds.

Especially looking only at 2026, there were three companies where I properly interviewed: adjoe, Glovo, and Bolt. I did, I guess, four rounds at adjoe, two at Glovo, and five at Bolt. I only made it to the final round at Bolt. And it worked out.

The 200 applications figure is also a bit skewed because a lot of those applications happened during the initial period when I was applying passively and not optimizing my resume or strategy. In 2026, when I was applying much more intentionally, I think it was around 40 applications, out of which those three serious interview processes happened.

Is getting the first interview now the hardest part?

What I have realized is that a lot of companies say they sponsor visas, and they proudly say that, but the reality is that they try to fill the role locally first. If they can’t find someone locally, then they move to global markets. I’m not saying all companies do this, but I have talked to people working at some of these companies, and this was a common theme.

It also makes sense because relocation has a cost. More importantly, it takes time. Someone relocating might take two or three months to actually join compared to someone joining locally. There is also the question of how willing the candidate really is to relocate because it’s a big change in someone’s life. For the company, if they wait three months and then the candidate doesn’t join, they are basically back to square one.

That’s why the main thing is optimizing each and every part of your pipeline: your resume, your LinkedIn, where you apply, and also actually being prepared. Let’s suppose you apply so many times and finally get a callback, but you are not prepared. Then that entire opportunity goes to waste.

If you started your international job search again today, what would you do first?

The first thing I would do is not start applying. First, try to understand the market. LinkedIn for sure. Relocate.me also helped me better understand which companies actually sponsor visas.

I went through a lot of articles on The Global Move and Relocate.me. For example, if you want to see whether a company in Amsterdam can actually sponsor visas, there is a government portal where companies have to register. Every country has its own nuances. Try to understand which companies are actually relocating people and sponsoring visas. Talk to people who have recently relocated or read articles from them. You can get a lot of ready-made information from someone who has already spent five or six months figuring this stuff out.

Something else that helped me was getting mentored by a recruiter. I got some mentorship from a recruiter at DoorDash. He was still in India, but he had experience talking to international recruiters and working with international recruiters. He helped me understand how things work behind the scenes. He took me through the LinkedIn Recruiter portal and showed me how recruiters filter candidates.

For me, it was just one or two calls to understand the market, figure out what I needed to optimize, and get a quick review of how I was applying. I don’t think you need someone to hold your hand for months. Maybe one or two sessions can help. You sit with a recruiter, do a few job applications together, and understand how you need to approach it. Then you can keep replicating it yourself. I used Topmate to find the mentor.

Andrew’s comment:

I really like this idea because your mentor doesn’t necessarily need to be in the country you want to relocate to. If you’re in India, Brazil, or another market, you can find someone from recruiting at a Big Tech company in your own country. They understand how hiring works inside these companies and can show you things that are very difficult to figure out from the outside. Because the hiring bar is high at these companies, the principles of getting noticed apply globally.

Here are a few mentoring platforms to check out:

• Topmate (the one Ameya used)

• ADPList

• MentorCruise

What should actually be on your resume?

The main thing I’ve learned about resumes is that less is more. I used to pack my resume with a lot of information. I still kept it to two pages, but there was a lot on there – maybe eight or nine bullet points per role, and three or four of them were very generic and vague. For example, “stakeholder communication.” Everyone does that. It didn’t really tell a story.

What developers don’t always realize is that, at the end of the day, it’s about the business metrics you moved and the impact you helped create for the company. That’s what I eventually realized.

Don’t use vague bullet points. Make them specific and to the point: I did this by doing this, and it helped move this business metric by this much. That helps someone reading your resume understand that you actually contributed to the company’s success in a measurable way.

Should you customize your resume for every single application?

Do you think you need to fully customize your resume for every company so it mirrors the job description? There are now a lot of tools where you can use LLMs to extract keywords and rebuild your resume for a particular vacancy. Another approach is to have one strong resume and only make smaller changes when something is particularly relevant. What worked for you?

I’ve done both to some extent. I tried optimizing my resume for each and every job description. Eventually, I figured out an approach that worked for me, at least.

Instead of optimizing your resume for every single role – which takes a lot of time when you’re applying to many jobs – find five or six companies you’d really want to work for. Take five or six job descriptions from those companies along with your current resume. Give them to an LLM and ask it to optimize your resume based on what hiring managers and recruiters across those companies are looking for.

You end up with a resume that works for maybe 80% to 90% of the companies you’re targeting because a lot of them are looking for similar things. That’s how I did it, and it worked really well for me.

I also kept a few bullet points ready for very specific, niche roles. For example, if I was applying to a B2B company where SDK experience was particularly relevant, I had a bullet point about my SDK experience ready to go. I could add that and remove something less relevant. But those situations were relatively rare. So for 80% to 90% of my applications, I could use my standard resume and then optimize it a bit for the remaining cases.

At one point, I went a bit crazy with LLMs, and I wasn’t happy with the results. You need to be honest with yourself. When you read your own resume, is it full of AI jargon, or does it actually tell your story? Maybe ask a friend who does some hiring or reach out to a recruiter. Getting another perspective can help you see what you might be missing.

Andrew’s comment:

I like this approach. With LLMs, resumes increasingly look exactly the same. I’d rather have one strong resume that actually tells your story and then remove, swap, or add a bullet point when there is a real reason to do it, instead of generating a new personality for every vacancy.

Does LinkedIn actually help?

You had a couple of opportunities that came through LinkedIn rather than just applications. What exactly happened?

One opportunity was adjoe. There was an iOS influencer who had posted something, and I commented on the post. At that point, I had decided to be a bit more proactive in commenting. A lot of people think that if they are looking for a career change, they need to start posting on LinkedIn, but you can also just comment.

It turned out that one of adjoe’s recruiters was following that influencer. He saw my comment and checked out my profile. I knew that he was from a company that sponsored visas, so I reached out to him. I remember I was in the metro when I sent the message, and I wasn’t expecting him to respond at all. But after a week or so, he did.

Another time, a recruiter from Meta reached out to me directly on LinkedIn. This was around September 2025, and he was recruiting iOS engineers in London. I didn’t do anything specific to get that message. Given Meta’s expectations around data structures and algorithms, and the fact that I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t feel confident enough at that point to go through the interview process. I told him maybe I’d do it in a few months.

LinkedIn can work, but it is very random. It is important to have all the relevant details on your profile and indicate exactly where you’re open to work (even without the Open to Work badge). I had my profile set to open to work across EMEA and in other regions I was interested in, like Australia. If a recruiter is actually looking for developers, your profile might then show up in their search results.

Andrew’s comment: I think of LinkedIn as a kind of interactive resume. A resume tells me what you did. On LinkedIn, I can also see who you follow, what you comment on, whether you actually know your field, how you communicate, and whether you add something useful to a professional discussion. Ameya’s adjoe example is a good reminder that you don’t need to become a LinkedIn creator. A useful comment in the right place can be enough.

What about GitHub and side projects?

I do believe that having a side project you can highlight on your resume helps. Nobody contacted me directly on GitHub, but I used to include my GitHub profile on my resume.

I hired iOS developers back in India when I was a manager. From that experience, I can say that one challenge engineering managers face now is that resumes look very polished because they’ve been written by AI. It’s very difficult to actually tell who’s a strong candidate and who isn’t.

What I used to do was check their GitHub. I know the code might also be written by AI, but at least I could see what kind of architectural choices they were making and get a better sense of how they approached things. I’d say a lot of hiring managers look at GitHub to see how active someone is, what sort of projects they’re building, and sometimes even dig into the code. So it does help.

Should you ask strangers for referrals?

What about the more non-linear approach: finding people from your country who already work at companies you want to join, connecting with them, and asking for a referral? Did you try anything like that?

I believe it works to a certain extent. I did some similar things. At the very least, I’d suggest sending connection requests to people at companies you’re interested in. LinkedIn works through a social graph. For a recruiter to even notice you, having some mutual connections can help.

I used to connect with expats from India working at companies I was interested in because I knew there might be a role there in the future and I might need a referral. When I applied to Bolt, I actually asked for a referral from an Indian expat there whom I didn’t know personally. I basically said: I’m a senior software engineer at this company. I saw a role at your company that fits my profile, and if you are comfortable referring me, could you do that?

Some people aren’t comfortable referring someone because they’ve been through the same struggles of relocating to another country. Obviously, they won’t refer anyone, but if you have a strong profile, some will.

You can also build a relationship first. Comment on someone’s success, send them a message – maybe they relocated or got promoted – and then, let’s say, two months later, there is a role at their company and they might remember you. But it takes more time, and you don’t know when it will pay off.

There is also a caveat. You need to be among the first applicants for a role. If the role has just opened and you spend a long time building a relationship before asking for a referral, you’re delaying your entry into the pipeline. A lot of European recruiters have a sort of first-come, first-served approach. They might start with the first 10, 20, or 30 relevant applicants. If you are applicant number 90 or 100 and they already have a pipeline, you might simply be put on hold. So it’s a balance.

Andrew’s comment:

I would probably add a little more of a personal layer before asking for a referral. If somebody moved from your country to Germany and now works at a company you’re targeting, you can simply ask about their experience or whether the company really hires from abroad. But Ameya makes a good counterpoint: if there’s already an open role, spending two weeks building a relationship can also mean entering the pipeline too late.

An interesting read on this is “The Strength of Weak Ties,” a famous 1973 paper by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter on the surprisingly important role that acquaintances and other weaker social connections can play in finding new opportunities.

Do cover letters still matter in 2026?

If a cover letter isn’t required, would you spend time writing one or just submit a strong resume quickly?

I believe it differs from company to company. Some companies might put a lot more emphasis on cover letters. Others might not. I used to send them, but if I have to write a cover letter for every single job I’m applying to, it takes too much time.

You need to have some template and then maybe use AI to fill in two or three relevant points. For the companies where I actually made it through the initial stages, I don’t believe I sent a cover letter to Bolt, Glovo, or adjoe. So it can definitely work without one.

If you have a good template and can optimize it quickly, I would send it. But I wouldn’t think, hey, I’m not sending a cover letter, so I’m going to get rejected.

Andrew’s comment:

My rule for cover letters is basically: either smash it or skip it. If you can write something genuinely specific and interesting that gives the recruiter another reason to talk to you, great. If it’s going to be another average AI-generated cover letter, I’d rather spend that time elsewhere.

How did you prepare for technical interviews after spending more time managing than coding?

The side project helped me in terms of system design and architecture, but not the actual live coding. For general technical interviews where they ask theoretical questions, I gathered a list of questions. You can find examples on Medium from people who have interviewed at big tech companies. I had a list of around 100 questions, and I practiced answering them on my own and reviewed them before interviews.

For live coding, I did something similar. I gathered questions that tend to come up frequently because there are certain types of problems that companies ask again and again. The important thing for me was timing myself. I would give myself one hour to build a small app or one screen from scratch, including the APIs and views.

I remember the first time I did this, I was sweating a lot. I was way off on the timing and couldn’t complete it in one hour. But you need to start somewhere. I practiced maybe 10 more times and eventually got better.

Andrew’s note:

Ameya shared the interview prep list he used during his job search with me. Most of it is specific to iOS development, but I liked the way he structured it. He grouped questions into Fundamentals, Live Coding, DSA, System Design, Behavioral, and Take-Home Assignments. He also tracked which companies asked each question, whether he had prepared it, and, in many cases, wrote out his own solution.

Your own list will obviously look different depending on your role, seniority, and the companies you’re targeting, but the idea is simple: build your own question bank, keep adding to it as you research and interview, practice it repeatedly, and time yourself where it makes sense.

What did the interview process with your current company, Bolt, look like?

The first round was the recruiter round.

The second round was a general technical interview. The list of around 100 questions I had prepared helped a lot there.

The third round was live coding. Because I had practiced live coding on my own under time constraints, I was able to perform well.

The fourth round was data structures and algorithms (DSA). General DSA practice is important. You can’t skip it. I don’t think I performed at my best in the DSA round. It was a tricky question and not something taken directly from LeetCode. It was more like a Bolt-type or Uber-type question. But I was able to solve it and suggest an optimal solution, which was enough.

Finally, there was a team-fit round.

One tip I would give is to go through Glassdoor for the particular company you’re interviewing with. If you are an iOS developer, look at iOS developer interview questions. If there aren’t enough, look at Android questions or DSA questions. Researching what sort of questions the company actually asks helped me a lot when preparing for interviews with Bolt.

What about take-home tests?

At adjoe, there was a take-home coding test. These days, companies, especially startups, can also be okay with you using AI for these sorts of rounds. But you need to know what you are doing.

The problem with take-home tests is that expectations have increased a lot with AI. You can’t just use AI, leave it at that, and come back. You need to know what it’s doing. And because everyone else can use AI too, expectations are higher. You’re expected to build fully fledged features.

I remember the adjoe test took me 7-8 hours, which is a lot of time compared to a one-hour live coding test. You need to be prepared for both take-home tests and live coding. I used to prefer take-homes because it can be difficult to perform under pressure. But take-homes can consume a lot more time.

How often did AI come up during interviews?

Most companies are now allowing AI in day-to-day tasks, so you need to be open to experimenting with it. That will also help you in these sorts of interview rounds.

I don’t think the market has completely moved toward AI-assisted interviews yet. Big tech companies first need to figure out what they’re actually measuring and create a standardized process. You can’t just say, “Use AI.” How are you going to measure the output?

Big tech usually has a one-to-five rating system for different competencies. I don’t see many companies having that kind of framework for AI yet. I know Meta has something, but not many big tech companies do. Startups might be more open to experimenting.

In general, I would say don’t be afraid of AI. Use it in your day-to-day work.

Should you put AI experience on your resume?

I would say yes, but I’ve seen resumes that go too far. They show how they use AI rather than the business impact they created with it.

A better example would be: I set up a spec-driven development process that helped engineers speed up development by this amount and led to this many features being rolled out. That’s a good example of showing the impact of AI usage.

But if you just say, “I have worked with Cursor or Claude,” I need to see some actual measurable impact. I have seen resumes where three out of five bullet points are about AI. If those bullet points don’t tell a story or show improvement, they just become clutter.

If AI writes more code, what makes someone a good software engineer?

Product understanding. You need to understand your product end to end. You need to have an ownership mindset and get things done. You need good communication skills.

You’ve always needed to communicate with product managers and other engineers, but it’s becoming even more important. If writing code is no longer the bottleneck, human intervention becomes the bottleneck. Your communication skills help you get around that.

So I would say ownership, communication, and understanding the product. And, in general, getting things done. Getting something over the line is not always easy. The hardest part is often the last 5%, when there’s some blocker. You need to make sure you’re leading the feature from end to end and actually getting it across the finish line. Leadership also plays a big role.

What advice about international job searching do you think is overrated?

Spamming thousands of roles is not going to help. First, you need to see whether you are actually a fit. If I’m an iOS developer applying for a React Native role, it is not going to help me. Applying to a company that I know won’t sponsor a visa doesn’t help either. You’re just wasting your time. You need to have a filter and know the companies you’re applying to.

Another one is just messaging recruiters. I know I talked to one recruiter and it helped me, but that was also because he already had some recollection of me from visiting my profile. Recruiters get thousands and thousands of messages. You might send the best message, but it still might not help. They also need to follow a process.

Unless you’re a creator or influencer and have made some name for yourself, just sending random messages to recruiters is not something I think you can rely on.

Was there a point where you were close to saying: I’m done, I don’t want to keep doing this?

There were many points. My plan was to spend October through December preparing and then get help from a German consultancy that could help me understand the market. But after talking to them, I realized that getting that sort of handholding didn’t make sense. It was extremely expensive, and I didn’t see enough value in it. At that point, I was a bit demotivated. Like, how am I going to figure this out?

There was also the point after adjoe. I believe I was almost at the end of the process and then eventually got rejected. I had this sort of panic attack situation while traveling to the office. At that point, I had to reduce my efforts a bit.

Those sorts of things happen. You need to figure out what works for you because it’s difficult to go to work and then put all of this effort into another job search. Applying for a role in your own country is already a job in itself. Now you’re doing it internationally, which is much more difficult.

You need to be prepared for this to take time. It could take a few months or even years. Celebrate the small wins. You get called to a first round. Okay, it doesn’t move forward. It’s still a win. You’ll learn. You keep learning.

One of my connections is an EM at a company in Germany. He told me: if you want to be in Europe, just keep going at it. You need to keep going.

Even if relocation doesn’t happen, is the process itself useful?

Yeah. The company I worked for was local, so I mainly talked with Indians. When I started interviewing in international markets, I was suddenly talking to people from all over the world. It gives you more confidence.

Then even within your company or your local market, you’re much more confident. At the end of the day, it’s also about self-discovery, and this process helps you build your own confidence.

What if you’re simply not ready to relocate yet?

Would you ever suggest that someone postpone relocation for a year or two and instead get the strongest possible experience in their local market first or through remote work? For example, joining Uber, Meta, or another internationally recognized company, or joining a fast-growing startup and using that as a stepping stone later?

Yeah, it would be reasonable. Sometimes you need to postpone certain things. If I want to be the best where I am and I can’t relocate right now, then maybe I can do whatever is best in front of me, which is my local market.

If you’re working at an international company like Meta, everyone knows Meta. When you send your resume, obviously it will get noticed. You still need to clear the rounds, but it does help.

Sometimes taking an indirect approach makes sense. There could also be an internal transfer at Meta or another company. You never know.

Why Estonia?

Estonia wasn’t originally one of the obvious countries you were targeting. What changed your mind?

I actually wasn’t applying to companies in Tallinn or Estonia for a while because it felt a bit niche. Generally, you first think about Amsterdam, Germany, Spain, and so on.

Estonia would come up because there are companies like Pipedrive, Wise, and Bolt that sponsor visas, but in general, I think the world is sleeping on Estonia a bit. Even I was.

My mentor helped me understand the market better and opened my eyes to Estonia.

Eventually, I learned more about the market and realized how digitally friendly Estonia is and how the tax system works. I think a lot of people aren’t aware of Estonia as an option. It deserves a look, at least.

How did the immigration process work?

The immigration process took around three months. First, you need to register for short-term employment. My company, Bolt, helped a lot with this, handling almost everything.

Once the short-term employment registration is done, you apply for a D visa, which is valid for one year, in your home country. The challenge was that the Estonian embassy in India is small, so getting an appointment slot isn’t easy. That took a while.

Once I arrived in Estonia, the next step was to apply for a temporary residence permit. Again, Bolt helped with almost everything. I only had to intervene a bit.

What surprised you about Tallinn?

Even before landing at the airport, I could see a lot of greenery. That is a common theme in Tallinn and Estonia. I love greenery.

Compared to India, obviously there are a lot of differences: sidewalks, cleanliness, and the number of parks. Something that was crazy to me was the level of digitization in Estonia, to the point where even voting happens digitally. I used to think in India, why can’t we vote digitally? I never thought there would actually be a country doing it.

In general, I’m liking Tallinn a lot. The cost of living is also not as high as in some other parts of Europe, and you get easy access to travel around Europe. I also knew Estonians were quite reserved and kept to themselves, which I actually like. Even in India, I’ve always been quite reserved or introverted. Once I make friends, obviously I talk a lot, but generally I’m reserved.

At Bolt, the team I’m on is amazing. There are a lot of different nationalities. Everyone is from a different country, which gives you different perspectives and helps when you’re building a product. The people have been very friendly.

It’s only been two weeks, but I’m understanding the company, the product, and the scale at which Bolt operates much more. It’s been better than I expected, both Bolt and Tallinn.

I came here with my wife, and she jokes that I should have been born here rather than in India because I feel more at home here. The kind of principles that I have align more with Estonia than India.

Will companies still relocate software engineers in the future?

If we consider that AI is going to impact technology, one thing that is already playing out is that if you’re a good developer, you can get much more out of AI. If you’re good at your job in your local market, I think there will still be opportunities in the future. Not only for senior developers. Even for good junior developers.

When you work with someone on a feature, you can quickly figure out: hey, this is an exceptional developer. They take their work seriously, they get things done, and they do it to the highest quality. If you’re someone like that, the market will always be open to you.

It will be more of a struggle. It won’t be like 2020, when Meta might reach out to you and say: come to London. Now you have to struggle a bit more.

I also don’t believe I’m the greatest developer. I’m just a bit above average. But there are other competencies, like communication and leadership, which can be much more important than coding. You can improve those.

I would say the relocation market will never be closed to exceptional talent or to people who can bring business impact. But if you expect it to be very easy – that you don’t need to network, you don’t need to optimize your resume, and you can just keep applying – it won’t be like that.

In terms of numbers, the relocation market might shrink. But the opportunities will never completely disappear. There are still markets like India, Brazil, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian markets that are known to have very good talent. Recruiters will still look at these markets.

It’s also very contextual. Imagine a startup gets a lot of funding and suddenly needs to build a team very quickly. That company isn’t necessarily moving together with the rest of the job market. It might suddenly need to hire at a completely different speed. Something similar was happening with Voodoo. They were trying to build a different product very quickly and were looking for developers.

So these opportunities will still appear.

Andrew’s comment:

I think that’s probably the right metaphor for the relocation market now. You need to catch the right wave, but you don’t know exactly when or where that wave will come. The only thing you can control is whether you’re ready when it does.

And a few final words: if you’re here, you’re the hero. I hope you find some helpful insights, as well as some inspiration to keep trying.

As a bonus, Ameya shared the resume that helped him get a job at Bolt with the community. I’m going to share it in my next article, along with an announcement about a new resume review session for my paid subscribers. So stay tuned!

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 145 handpicked jobs: 105 relocation-friendly positions and 40 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,800+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 33 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Front End – 8 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Full Stack – 12 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Mobile – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 12 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 3 roles

• Data & AI – 30 roles (incl. 6 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 14 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Security – 6 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Gaming – 6 roles

• Product – 13 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Other – 7 roles (incl. 5 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (140+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

The Global Move has partnered with Manifest, a trusted U.S. immigration law firm, as part of my effort to make this newsletter as useful as possible for those planning a move abroad for work.

Manifest specializes in U.S. employment-based visas — EB-1, O-1, National Interest Waivers, and more.

What sets Manifest apart, beyond their team’s extensive experience and track record of helping hundreds of professionals obtain work visas and green cards, is their personalized approach. They match you with an attorney based on your specific needs and provide dedicated one-on-one support to build the strongest possible petition.

Learn more about Manifest

If you’ve been trying to get a job overseas to work and live in a new country, and you’re a bit frustrated with cover letters and relocation jobs, please remember that internal mobility is still a valid, alternative way to move abroad with a job.

By alternative ways to relocate, I mean any way that does not correspond to “getting a job and that employer sponsors you.” This is the way I sometimes refer to as the classic one, and it’s quite alive (just last week I published an article about Vinted, the Lithuanian unicorn with an excellent relocation policy).

Internal mobility is the newest entry in my Employer Not Required series because it’s a way to live and work abroad without getting a job that allows you to relocate first. So what you do is turn the whole process back on its head.

You might have thought about this route a thousand times, but I’ll interrupt you: Have you asked the right questions to realize if your employer will let you do it? Because that’s what I’ll help you do here. Read on.

Internal mobility: Don’t think it’s moving across town!

A short definition to avoid confusion.

Internal mobility means moving within your current company to a different position in a different country.

Internal mobility at first might sound like me suggesting you move from your current city, in the country where you are (internal is a bit confusing here). Let’s suppose you are reading from Brazil, from São Paulo, and your employer asks you to go to the Brasília office. Well, it sounds a lot like “internal” mobility. But no, I do not mean that.

📔 Spoiler alert: Why the internal mobility path might be especially attractive in 2026

When I finish with some useful sections, I’ll tell you why I wrote this in the first place: some facts and figures tell me that this might be an exceptionally effective approach this year! But first things first.

How to know if internal mobility is achievable with your employer: A bunch of questions

Let’s say you’re interviewing right now with three employers in your current city. And you’re reading this and realize that the internal mobility path sounds appealing, and that you’d want to try it with your new employers. If you were to receive offers from all three, how would you know which one to pick to be able to tap into the internal mobility path?

All of that you can answer with a handful of questions which I paraphrase below:

• Does your company have an office abroad?

• Do they hire expats at the overseas offices?

• How long did expats work there before they moved?

Does the company currently have an office abroad?

Ask yourself this and see what the answer is. If the company you work for or that you plan to work for has an office abroad, then that’s a positive sign.

Now, not every company that says they got international presence actually has a workforce abroad.

You might come to notice that perhaps one company has a “presence” abroad because it landed a client through a cold call, and it had to issue an invoice. So now, said company has a legal entity in a new country, and that’s why they declare they have “presence” in that country. (This is a valid and honest way of seeing things, by the way.) But if you investigate more extensively, you notice that in practice it does not have a real office in that country, or at most it only has a contract and that’s it. It is not as international as you thought.

If you’re interviewing for three companies, the one with the international workforce will be more promising than the one that says they’re international because they invoiced in Poland or Germany.

Within the company, if they do have people working overseas, what nationality are they?

This is also a great question that could clarify if your employer is good for the internal mobility path.

Let’s say that your employer has numerous employees in the USA. Sounds great!

But then… you look at their LinkedIn profiles, and you realize they are all Americans. This happens! It can happen, for example, because an investor recommended a certain manager, and that manager likes to hire her team, people she knows who work well. So it happens that they’re all from her school in the USA, and, well, they’re only hiring Americans in the USA. In many South American startups, this has been standard policy for more than a decade already.

If your employer only hires citizens from your target country, then the internal mobility scorecard is down a couple of points!

How long does it take for employees to convince them to move abroad?

Let’s say your employer does have offices abroad, and you check LinkedIn, and they hire candidates from everywhere (which is quite standard! The Dutch company Catawiki does it, for example).

You can now try to surmise how long the internal mobility path is within that company by checking the current employees’ career history on LinkedIn. If you, for example, notice someone from your country who is working in an office in Hamburg, you go into their LinkedIn profile, and you see that they formerly worked two years in São Paulo before going to Hamburg. You know you are going to have to be at least two years, or that that is a good benchmark.

When is it the right time to petition your employer to relocate you?

Okay, I apologize for the vague answer, but it depends! I, personally, know someone who demanded this during the interview stage (I’ll tell you his story later on). I don’t think there’s a timeframe, really. If the company, for example, needs to open operations in France, and they need a hire, and you’ve been working there for less than a year, but you got a good standing with the decision-makers, maybe you can volunteer yourself to move internally there!

Now that you have answered for yourself these three questions, you can consider the internal mobility thanks to how officially authorized it is. I’ll explain that right away.

The L-1 visa means that the US government approves and expects moves of this kind

The L-1 visa is one that I don’t think gets a lot of attention. It’s the “Intracompany Transferee Executive or Manager” visa, which means a company can use it to send an employee to the USA.

To apply for the L-1 visa, you require at least one continuous year of working for the company abroad in the last three years. Also, you must have been a direct, full-time employee on the payroll, so no, you can’t be an independent contractor or freelancer and apply for it.

Very recently, I wrote about one of our partners, Manifest Law, and one of the visas I named as a standout was the L-1 because it doesn’t have the same setbacks that the H-1B visa has. To begin with, the L-1 visa doesn’t require $100,000 for new applicants, which the H-1B recently began demanding.

There’s an official visa in the USA for the internal mobility path, which means you, as an employer, will have greater leverage to propose a change to a new office. There’s also an official EU permit which I’ll discuss later on.

So yes, the internal mobility path is not, let’s say, a quirky, ambiguous way to move around! It’s a way so standard that the US government and the European Commission actually authorize visas for it.

Why the L-1 is worth it right now (and it makes internal mobility especially attractive in 2026)

Like the spoiler alert said: Internal mobility is looking particularly attractive this year, perhaps especially in contrast to other USA paths. Let’s see.

What the USCIS numbers show in 2026

Look, for example, at how many assignments USCIS has been completing in recent months. Below, you can see how completions dropped from 637,000 to 258,000 procedures (April 2025 to April 2026), according to an excellent data set from the Niskanen Center. And according to public data, USCIS Q1 ended with 11 million pending cases.

So this is a standard measurable way to say: Asking USCIS to process your form in 2026 has become harder than before.

But the L visas aren’t having this difficult season. In fact, Forbes published in April 2026 that one of the types of visas with declining denial rates are the blanket L ones. (Blanket L means: USCIS pre-approves the company for internal transfers and then, when they send an individual request, the approval is much faster and easier. So if your company has a blanket L pre-authorization, you’re in favorable circumstances.)

A real case of an engineer who used the internal mobility path

One case of internal mobility I personally can attest to was from an engineer from a Big Tech company you know very well about (although the company’s heyday was in the 70s, probably). He was able to go down the internal mobility path by switching to an employer that he knew would eventually let him move to the USA.

What he did was negotiate this relocation during the interview stage!

The thing is, this engineer met a startup’s founder during a work meeting, and the founder was impressed with him. The owner of that startup eventually wanted to hire him.

So what the engineer did was tell him: “I’ll work for you, but I’ll be your first USA employee in a couple of years.” He proposed a whole new business unit to the founder!

Since the owner of the startup was going to receive an investment round and one of the stated requirements was to expand the market and open there, he agreed to hire the engineer. They signed the contract with that precondition.

But remember: You do need to work at least a full year with the company to be eligible for the L-1 visa. So a few years later, the startup made sure he moved to Florida with his family. He’s still there.

So in a way, this engineer offered the startup a solution to a problem (“we’ll need ops in the USA, who do we hire?”)

If you’re interviewing right now, use this story to your advantage.

Quick note: There’s a whole world out there! 🌍

This article might have come across as too USA-centered because I focused on this visa, but as I always say: There’s an entire universe of interesting markets and excellent salaries out there for engineers who want to relocate. You can live and work in the Netherlands, Portugal, or Lithuania, to mention three examples, for superb salaries and great standards of living and don’t even use the L-1 visa. Actually, thanks to the ICT-EU framework, internal mobility is also an official path in the European Union.

The Intra-Corporate Transfers Directive for the EU 🇪🇺

One attractive legal framework with which you can request to be transferred to a European office is the Intra-Corporate Transfers Directive, or ICT-EU. (No, ICT here does not mean information and communications technologies, so it’s not a special framework for tech workers.)

With it, you can stay for up to three years in your target European country. In typical European fashion, you can move to work in other member states without starting over the process!

It’s actually a bit quicker than the USA counterpart, since to request it, you must work continuously for your multinational company outside the EU for a minimum of three to 12 months, depending, among other things, on your role. Roles are divided into managers, specialists, and trainees, and trainees usually require shorter stints at the company, but they can only stay for one year. Managers and specialists, on the other hand, can stay for up to three years.

Then again, the EU is a collective of member states, and each member state might have its own requirements. For example, countries like Italy require three months for any role, while Germany typically requires six months.

In practical terms, the limitation of three or six months won’t make a big difference. As I wrote before, you do need to be in a position to request this transfer, and asking your employer to move you to a new office abroad in just three months seems a little hurried (although, who knows! Maybe you’re presented with the opportunity three months in, and then you’re legally permitted to ask for this.)

Some interesting information about the ICT-EU visa includes an alleged grace period. I read online that some users asked about this: a period where, if you’re out of your employment, you can still stay in that country, like Spain or Italy. Well, there’s apparently no grace period at all. Your stay in the EU country with that visa depends on your job, so without a job, your visa is no longer valid. You’ll need to switch visas or to use your tourist time limit to stay.

In terms of citizenship, it looks like, in the Netherlands, this permit can indeed contribute to your “time bank.” ICT considered a temporary purpose of stay but, in the Dutch country, it should count towards citizenship time. When deciding on your new host nation, this could make a difference!

My conclusion: Relocating is still possible in 2026

Relocating is still possible. Sometimes, and this happens to me a lot every time I write an article for The Global Move, I review the USA visa approval rates and well, it seems like it’s an all-time low and like the opportunity to get a visa there has faded away.

But no! That’s not true. It might be harder to find a job that allows you to live abroad than it was in 2021, but it’s still a thing. With the right filters, with the right research, and also reading my newsletter where I currently share advice and also share jobs, you will be able to find in 2026 too, and that is my hopeful message.

Subscribe to The Global Move and receive a curated list of relocation-friendly jobs. And if you were able to pull this path off, I’d love to learn from your experience! Other readers will appreciate it. Please comment below 👇

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 143 handpicked jobs: 102 relocation-friendly positions and 41 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,900+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 24 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Front End – 3 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Full Stack – 16 roles (incl. 9 remote)

• Mobile – 2 roles

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 18 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 9 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Data & AI – 23 roles (incl. 7 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 7 roles

• Security – 2 remote roles

• Gaming – 5 roles

• Embedded Development – 2 roles

• Product – 11 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Design – 2 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Other – 19 roles (incl. 5 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (140+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

But still, there’s a less quirky way, and you probably know it by heart: If you want to work and live abroad, you can start by finding an employer that can sponsor your move. I often call this the “classic” way of relocating with a job.

Today’s article talks about this classic route, done by a company that has a well-built relocation strategy that has been helping them find the best engineers out there. This company is Vinted, which I recently wrote about on my LinkedIn, in part perhaps because of their whopping limited-time gross bonus of €30,000 and full support when moving to their HQ in Lithuania.

Go to careers.vinted.com. The first item in the navigation bar is Relocation. Ahead of How We Hire, ahead of Early Careers, ahead of the blog, ahead of About. You’ll soon realize this is on purpose and not an accident.

What Vinted represents in today’s market

Vinted Marketplace invites you to sell what is yours and declutter your closet. You can, of course, also buy second-hand products on their platform. The picture that forms in your head is a barter table at a street fair, and that’s partly accurate. Two friends in Vilnius, Lithuania, did start it in 2008 because Milda Mitkutė was moving apartments with too many clothes, and Justas Janauskas built her a site to give them away.

What it became is a technology company, and I would like to mention that exactly like that, plainly, because if you walk into the process with the swap table in your head it is going to cost you.

The figures are on the record, and they are not small. Vinted became Lithuania’s first unicorn in 2019, when they raised €128 million at a €1 billion valuation. In 2024, a secondary share sale of €340 million put it at €5 billion. According to their own website, this helped drive some outstanding 2025 results: €10.8 billion in gross merchandise value and more than €60 million in net profit. A great deal of this growth is probably due to their active strategy to bring in international talent. I’ll discuss that in a moment.

The company has three main business units. Vinted Marketplace is the platform everybody knows, the market itself, and which also has an app for mobile users. Vinted Go is logistics, with more than 500,000 pickup and drop-off points and a sorting center in France, running across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Finland. Vinted Pay handles payments. They employ over 2,200 people, in Vilnius, Kaunas, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, London, Luxembourg, Paris, and more. Count the countries on that list before you keep reading. In July 2026, they opened operations in Australia, with Australia Post handling every delivery, after research that put decluttering ahead of the cost of living as the reason Australians were signing up.

(A short note because I went and checked before writing it. Very few companies on Earth own a marketplace, a payments institution and a logistics network all at once. Mercado Libre does, in Latin America, and it is a monstrously large company with no serious rival across a region of hundreds of millions of people. Alibaba does, in China, and it is Alibaba itself. That is the shelf Vinted has quietly climbed onto, and I do not think most candidates realize how hard it is to have this kind of vertical integration in 2026.)

The stack, and why I am handing it to you

I ran vinted.com through Wappalyzer while I was doing some research for this piece (the same move I recommended in our cover letter article, where one of our readers checked a company’s front end and then wrote about it in his letter). But this is a marketplace, payments, and logistics company, so a few components off a website won’t tell the whole story.

Fortunately, the backend is public and well documented. It was originally a large Ruby on Rails application, and in 2023 the engineering team wrote about bringing Go in as a general-purpose backend language because Rails on its own stopped fitting the scale (again, on its own! Not dissing Ruby on Rails here). They handle search on Elasticsearch with data coming from MySQL and going through an indexing pipeline made of Kafka and Kafka Connect, with Kubernetes and Docker at the base. They regularly publish open-source tooling around Kafka and Elasticsearch on GitHub.

So this means they have plenty of programmer (I’m specifically saying programmer here, as in, broader than just saying developer) roles. On their site, you can see backend, data engineering, data science, or analytics engineering roles with relocation packages open right now. And some of them are mixed in a way I find quite interesting. For example, the analytics engineering role I opened sits inside marketing, where the people around you are mostly not technical, and where most engineers have never once had to think about attribution. Marketing people are rarely versed in the stack, and engineers are rarely versed in marketing*. A role that stands in the middle of that is exceptionally unlikely, and I would check it out on those grounds alone.

*I, personally, know a couple of exceptions but my point holds!

The relocation bonus as their strategy

As I write this, searching relocation on their jobs page returns 11 open roles. All engineering and data science, mostly to Lithuania. And every single one of them carries the same tag in the title: limited-time relocation bonus.

Vinted has a long-standing relocation culture, and as such they have a standard package already in place. The standard package if you get the job and need relocation includes:

• Help with documentation for you and your family,

• help in finding temporary and then permanent housing,

• help opening a bank account,

• cultural integration support, which includes language lessons so that you can handle Lithuanian.

The standard gross bonus is €3,000 moving alone from within Europe, €5,000 with a partner or a child, or €6,000 and €10,000 if you are coming from outside Europe. For the limited-time offer they took the gross bonus to €30,000, threw in the first two months of temporary housing, and added a nursery and school search for your kids.

Sit with the €30,000 gross limited-time bonus for a second, because I did.

Nobody hands you €30,000 by accident. A number like that means a people team sat down, analysed what this profile costs to find locally, and concluded that bringing international engineers into Vilnius and Kaunas pays for itself. It is a studied, strategic decision, and it tells you how serious they are about relocation. When we wrote about how to tell whether a company is genuinely open to international candidates, this might be the strongest signal on the whole list.

They also say 100+ colleagues from across Europe have already moved to Lithuania, and they run an internal community called Internationals at Vinted for exactly those people. So yes, Vinted has a long-standing relocation culture.

What the money looks like

Vinted publishes the salary band inside the job ad, which on its own puts them ahead of most of the market. The analytics engineering role I opened lists a gross monthly range of €3,433 to €4,650.

A number in euros means nothing without a floor to stand it against, so: the average gross monthly wage in Lithuania was roughly €2,430 in 2025, per the State Data Agency.

Which means the bottom of that band already sits around 40% above the national average, and the top is roughly double it and level with what the capital pays its engineers. That is a good salary. For a mid-level role, in a country where your rent is not, let’s say, Zurich rent, it is a very good salary. Do the arithmetic on take-home and cost of living the way we walked through it in answering the salary question before you hold it up next to a headline number out of Berlin.

How they hire, and how long it will actually take

Their How We Hire page gives you five stages. They’re:

• Talent acquisition interview.

• Hiring manager interview.

• Assignment.

• Panel interview.

• Final evaluation round.

They tell you up front that the last three do not apply to everybody, and that you will be told which ones apply to you at the start.

I like that they publish it. I also like that they answer how long hiring takes. Literally, off their site, they say it depends. Yes, they’re honest, but I understand if you’re irritable about this, since we all like specifics. So let me put two reference points on the table from outside Vinted.

In 2025, we interviewed a software engineer who moved to Amsterdam, and his employer runs an explicit four-week policy from application to offer: take-home assignment, technical round, pair programming and a behavioural interview, all sit inside that window.

But let’s use a different example. In the cover letter article, we studied a letter from one of our own readers. The letter was dated 30 December. His first interview for the relocation role happened in June. Six months, door to door.

So, as a reference, in 2026, four weeks is the exception, and six months is what the market looks like in 2026, and I would much rather tell you that now than have you spiral in week seven. It is the same thing we said about preparing months before you apply. This is not the 2021 market. The people who get through are the ones who started early and stayed patient while nothing appeared to be happening. So expect a hiring-with-relocation process that could last between one and six months.

About Lithuanian

No, you do not need to speak it to work at Vinted. Vinted works in English and says so in its FAQ. They also say (and I agree) that picking up the basics will make your life outside the office considerably easier, and they point you to the learning budget to pay for the lessons.

Nobody is asking you to speak the way Domantas Sabonis speaks Lithuanian and English at an NBA press conference. Aim lower than the Sabonis bar. Just start.

How I would prepare to apply

What comes next repeats advice I have given for several other job application processes on The Global Move. But wait! I am not telling you to copy and paste an application from another job. The opposite is the point. All I’m saying is that, for Vinted, there’s a common piece of advice that I would use, and if you’ve been reading these last few months, you won’t find it surprising at all.

So, if I wanted this job, I would build the application on a bunch of things.

Know their mission very well. Second-hand as a first choice is a real position with real consequences. I’m thinking, right now, a lower carbon footprint per garment, or objects that were once loved passing into new hands. Also, money going into the pockets of seemingly ordinary families. Their marketplace also carries shops, so small businesses sit in there too. Now: if none of that moves you, say something else instead, but don’t just think these guys are a marketplace. They really have a mission underway.

Think about the market you could work on. Look at where they just opened and think about where they go next. Australia landed in July 2026. If I were interviewing for a role based in Vilnius, I would still show up with an actual opinion about what New Zealand would take.

Show them you have applied to the role and have considered the target city. If the role were in Hamburg, where Vinted has offices, I would also mention my deep affection for the Beatles, who got great at playing live in Hamburg. A person who has thought about a city is a person who is likely to stay in it.

Think of the vertical, so you can think horizontal. Marketplace, Go and Pay are three genuinely different engineering problems assembled inside one company. They integrated vertically instead of outsourcing their business, which means you might get a shot at moving horizontally. Just tell them you acknowledge these facts! A backend engineer who joins on the marketplace side and later moves into a licensed payments institution has done something very, very few engineers in Europe ever get the chance to do.

The homework. Read the engineering blog. Read the newsroom. Read what their tech leads have published. Then find those people on LinkedIn and count how many degrees of separation you actually have, and go through our piece on getting a job abroad through LinkedIn and the one on networking and referrals while you do it.

Their application form has a cover letter field. Use it. Read our cover letter guide first, and keep in mind what PostHog says in their own hiring advice: keep it short, do not reword your resume, do something that makes you stand out.

Tell the truth on the work authorisation question

The form asks whether you are legally authorised to work where you are applying. Then, separately, whether you would need relocation to Lithuania, and which country you are relocating from.

We have written about knockout questions in applicant tracking systems, or, the ones that downgrade your candidacy on one answer. Do you live within 50 kilometres of the office?, the form asks, but you live somewhere around 51. You answer honestly. The system filters you out, and so on. Those kinds of questions sometimes make candidates submit any random response just to advance to the next stage.

This form is not that, and the wording deserves credit. Work authorisation and relocation are two separate questions, and the relocation question exists precisely so you can say no, I am outside Lithuania and yes, I need support. Answering no on work authorisation costs you nothing here. So do not invent one in order to get further into the process and negotiate it later. I implore you! It costs you the offer at the point where somebody in legal opens your passport.

Why Vinted is an excellent choice to work and live in Europe

A company that puts relocation first in its navbar, publishes its salary bands, publishes its interview stages, and then puts €30,000 gross behind moving one engineer to Vilnius has made a decision about international talent and is paying real money to act on it. And yes, that’s Vinted in a nutshell.

So be sure to make the best out of this opportunity. Take advantage by really preparing your application. Recruiters and hiring managers alike will love that there’s someone on the other end that’s as invested as them in relocation.

Good luck!

I publish relocation-friendly tech roles every week at The Global Move, and it’s slowly becoming the largest hand-curated list of jobs with visa sponsorship and relocation support. If you are getting ready for your move, subscribe and start building your runway now.

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 152 handpicked jobs: 111 relocation-friendly positions and 41 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,800+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 39 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Front End – 4 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Full Stack – 12 roles (incl. 6 remote)

• Mobile – 5 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 20 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Data & AI – 29 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 10 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Security – 2 roles

• Gaming – 3 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Embedded Development – 3 roles

• Product – 5 roles

• Design – 3 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Other –10 roles (incl. 2 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (150+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

📌 Quick announcement before you dive into today’s post

Next week, on August 20, Manifest will host a webinar exclusively for our community:

Relocating to the U.S.: Your Visa Roadmap from First Step to Green Card

​In this session, Manifest immigration attorney Henry Lindpere will cover:

• ​The most common visa categories for people relocating to the U.S.

• ​Employment-based options: H-1B, O-1A, TN, J-1, and others

• ​Entrepreneur and investor pathways including E-2 and O-1A

• ​Family-based options and how they interact with other pathways

• ​How to think about your initial visa choice in light of your long-term goals

• ​What the path from a temporary visa to a green card typically looks like

• ​Common mistakes people make when planning an international move

👉 Register now to secure your spot

Here at The Global Move, and over on Relocate.me, we usually agree that the classic way to move abroad for work, including to the United States, is that a company sponsors you. (This is not the only path, though.)

What has changed is that in the United States, over the last twelve to twenty-four months, the classic route got noticeably more difficult.

You will remember the headline. In September 2025, a presidential proclamation attached a $100,000 payment to new H-1B petitions for people outside the country (it expires this September, though). The lottery shrank too. Registrations fell from 330k to roughly 211k in a single year. And the queue behind all of it grew, with USCIS ending 2025 at 11 million cases pending. (I don’t think the queue is discussed enough!)

So it is tempting to write the dramatic version, the one where the U.S. closed down its doors to expats.

I doubt that’s the case. I think it got stricter and pricier, but it is still very much open, and how you present your case now carries more weight than it did a few years ago. Which makes this a good moment to think hard about exactly that.

By the way… the $100,000 fee never touched the O-1, the L-1, or the E-2. So what if you can partner up with a company that can help you pursue those permits?

Manifest: A legaltech firm for expats who want to move to the US

One of the companies that can help you put your petition together is Manifest. Manifest is a modern U.S. immigration law firm specializing in employment-based visas and green cards, including the O-1, L-1, or EB-1.

Dan Mishin, its founder, is originally from Ukraine, and he went through (and into!) the American system himself on an O-1. He says he spent tens of thousands of dollars getting into the system. That is a familiar story to anyone who has broken through that particular wall, and it had the familiar consequence: other expats started asking him how he did it, how he managed to live and work in the US.

What he built out of that is two connected things. Manifest OS is the technology company, and it builds the software and runs the operation. Manifest Law is the law firm they’re servicing, and they’ve already served more than 3,000 clients. They recently raised $60M, so they’re an established player.

Like I recently wrote on LinkedIn, what readers of The Global Move will appreciate about Manifest is that they don’t hand your case off to a paralegal. Instead, based on your case, you are matched with an experienced lawyer, get one-on-one help, and can keep track of your query at all times.

So if you’re planning to move to the US, and you were eyeing the O-1, maybe you can speak with Manifest. They can help you move to the U.S. without praying you get picked.

The visas that need no employer, but need someone to handle them for you

Manifest runs two practices, one for people filing on their own record and one for employers relocating staff. They have handled thousands of individual clients alongside hundreds of corporate programs. Since I’m writing for engineers who want to relocate and work in the U.S., this article is about the first kind.

I’ll start by mentioning that saying that you need no employer for a visa in the U.S. doesn’t automatically mean you can handle it all by yourself.

Yes, a few American visas do not require an employer to file the petition for you. It means you can pursue one without a job already waiting on the other side.

But not anyone can file these visas. That’s the shortcoming.

I ran into this writing about Portugal, where certain filings have to go through someone formally appointed. Some American petitions work on the same principle. It does not have to be a company that employs you, but it does have to be somebody with the right legal standing. That is what a firm like Manifest Law is for, and, if the founder’s own story is any guide, part of the pitch is that you do not repeat his exorbitant bills.

The O-1

I wrote a full guide to the O-1 for The Global Move, and my conclusion then holds now: it is a visa that suits very few people, and you have to understand it properly before you spend a year of your life on it.

You qualify with one major internationally recognized award, or by meeting at least three of eight criteria. An officer then weighs the whole picture. There is no cap and no lottery, it runs three years to start, and the extensions have no limit on how many you can take.

Two people I have spoken to finished MBAs at good American universities and were both already eyeing the O-1 as the way to stay once their grace period ran out. That tells me something. This is a visa that will be more contested than it used to be, because people who never previously needed to consider it, people who had other and frankly more comfortable routes, are now looking straight at it. You can expect competition company.

For the O-1, you need a U.S. petitioner. It can be an agent, and it can be a company you own, though a company you own still has to show a real employment relationship.

The EB-1A and the EB-2 NIW

The EB-1A is the extraordinary ability green card, and it is one of the very few you can file entirely on your own behalf with no employer anywhere in the picture (the official website literally suggests an Olympic medal or a Pulitzer as your accolades, though). The EB-2 NIW, the national interest waiver, is the other self-filed option. It skips the labour certification step completely.

But here’s the outlook for them.

I have been gathering figures for a while, and this is what I saw. Refusals on both of these roughly doubled in a single year. The national interest waiver went from 38.8% denied to 64.3%. (The O-1 moved too, but from a much lower base, denials went from about 5% to about 7% over the same stretch, nowhere near the jump in NIW denials.) The oddest part is that the written rules never changed. Just a few months after USCIS quietly changed its guidance on these cases, officers started asking for stronger proof.

Then there is the queue

Getting approved and getting a green card are two different problems! The queue is the backlog. Once your petition lands, when do they answer? How many Reddit threads will you read from someone who has heard nothing in nine months? How many times will you refresh a status page?

Where you watch the queues is the Visa Bulletin. EB-1 is up-to-date for most of the world, but it sits at October 2022 for India and July 2023 for mainland China. EB-2 for India is already unavailable for the rest of the fiscal year.

So if you are reading me from India, here is a practical thought, and it is mine rather than anybody’s official advice: look seriously at the EB-1A rather than the national interest waiver.

Two more worth naming

Just some info on a couple of visas.

The L-1 moves you from a company abroad to a related American entity, and it asks for one continuous year working for them overseas first. If you already work inside a multinational, this one is sitting there and hardly anybody asks about it. Also, you don’t have to pay those $100,000 upfront!

The E-2 is for investors putting real money into an American business they control. It only works if your country has the right treaty with the US, though. It is Japan, and they take about 30% of every E-2 visa that is given out, from what I could gather. I wouldn’t discard it quickly, though, since it has good approval rates from what I’ve read.

Yes, it’s hard to make it this year, I agree

Let me pause for a second. So far, this article sounds like a series of inconveniences stitched one after the other, and I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be negative or pessimistic, but yes, it’s harder to live and work in the U.S. with these visas than it has been in years.

But being serious, it is also completely doable. Every single time I sit down to rebuild one of these guides, I come away more convinced that people get through, and that the ones who get through chose carefully and prepare properly.

What Manifest does differently

A lot of times in the legal industry, you pick up the phone and a clock starts. You are billed by the hour, and you find out what it cost you afterwards. To me, this seems like an old B2B way of working that will just not cut it for a software engineer who wants to relocate and needs a certain assurance that they’re putting their money and time in the right place!

Manifest charges a flat fee instead, so you know the number going in. I’ll stress this because it’s critical. If you wanted to talk to lawyers for a flat fee like you do with a SaaS, well, that wasn’t quite common! Manifest saw the opportunity to help expats with this flat fee pricing.

Around that payment model they have built AI-assisted drafting, a client portal where you watch your own case progress, a review by a former USCIS officer before filing, and replies inside five hours. They publish a 94% approval rate across their cases. This is against a national rate they put at 85%. What I do rate is that they publish their prices at all, and comparison pages against named competitors.

Remember that, you will be matched with an experienced lawyer, get one-on-one help, and always be able to keep track of your petition. That’s probably how they ensure high rates!

What it costs: A flat fee for software engineers

It is not uncommon to get legal help with moving to the United States. Firms have been doing this for decades, mostly without a platform, without AI, without venture capital and without a flat fee. Like I told you, they had stipulated hourly billing!

I have gathered this from colleagues and from watching the market: a traditional firm will charge you somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 for O-1 processing, and sometimes more. I know how unsatisfying that is. The top of the range is more than double the bottom, and that is genuinely how the industry has worked. (If you’re reading this and can provide your testimonial regarding attorney fees, please drop a comment, since I’d love to include your input on this write-up!)

But instead, Manifest charges $6,999 to $10,500 for the same process, in Silver, Gold, Platinum, or Diamond tiers, with the higher tiers adding the ex-USCIS review and a money-back guarantee. Their O-1 starts at $6,999, and the EB-1A starts around $8,995. The real value here is in the predictability, since the flat fees are in the normal range and not below it!

They also have a money-back guarantee that I would definitely look into if you book a consultation with them.

Government fees are up (like almost everything else, right?)

Government filing fees sit on top of all of that, and since old-school law firms won’t quote them to you, I’m leaving them here. From an updated, 2026 Google search, I confirm you should budget roughly $830 to $1,700 depending on who petitions, about $1,015 for a self-filed EB-1A or NIW, another $2,965 if you want premium processing, and $1,440 later to adjust status. It will likely take a year if you don’t pay for premium processing.

Is this for you?

If you were already looking at the O-1 or the EB-1A, then something like this is worth your time. You were looking because you suspect you can build a real case, which means you probably have the raw material. You are missing the person who knows how to assemble it into something that reads as extraordinary to a stranger with a checklist.

If you were contemplating paying your way in from an early stage of your career, this is the wrong door. Look instead at the employer-sponsored routes, or at moving with a remote job through an employer of record, or at the education path I have written about before, which opens plenty of countries that are not the United States.

You can also always fill in the forms yourself. That option is real, it is free apart from government fees, and for some people it is the right call. What I would avoid is any entity promising you both the sky and earth for one price. Work with well-known firms, make sure that legal fees are kept separate from government fees, and be wary of any promise of a certain outcome.

If you’re considering which visa or permit you should pursue, you can book a consultation with Manifest and they’ll advise you.

Where I land: Living and working in the United States in 2026

It is tempting to run ahead of the evidence and announce that the road to working in the U.S. as a foreigner shut in the last year. But no, it’s not shut. I’ll just say it got harder, it demands higher standards, and more than effort it demands a kind of “self-marketing” skill, because not everything is solved simply with a little sweat and toil and grit. What you own at the end of it is a record of who you are and what you can do. The variable I would pay the most attention to in 2026 is how that record gets presented. You need to market yourself!

And readily acknowledge that 2021 is over. That zeitgeist, that stretch where offers rained on software engineers because every company on earth pivoted at once to digital products, is over. That is not the market anymore.

There is something clarifying in that, actually. The spray-and-pray strategy of hurling dozens of resumes is free, and you can now automate it, which is precisely why it is worth so little. Sitting down with people who are serious and methodical, and paying them, forces you to answer honestly how much you want this and what you are actually prepared to do. That is a decent test to run on yourself.

I do not want to discourage anybody. The opposite, if anything. Every time I write one of these pieces, I finish it more certain that there are ways through. It is just that this year, more than most, you have to be very selective and very smart about which one you walk.

Thanks for reading! I publish relocation-friendly tech roles every week at The Global Move, and it’s becoming the largest hand-curated list of jobs with visa sponsorship and relocation support right now, with a job board and all. If you are getting ready for your move, subscribe and start building your runway now.

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 153 handpicked jobs: 113 relocation-friendly positions and 40 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,900+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 18 roles (incl. 7 remote)

• Front End – 8 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Full Stack – 13 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Mobile – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 22 roles (incl. 6 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 11 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Data & AI – 39 roles (incl. 10 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 10 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Security – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Embedded Development – 3 roles

• Product – 5 roles

• Design – 3 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Other – 10 roles (incl. 3 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (150+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

That naturally leads to the next question:

That’s probably the question I received most often after publishing that article.

I don’t think there’s one perfect website that solves the problem. If there were, I’d simply send everyone there.

Instead, I think relocation today is much more about building the right search strategy than finding another job board. Over the years, I’ve seen people relocate in many different ways, and that’s perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned: there isn’t one path.

If I were starting my relocation journey today, this is exactly how I’d approach it.

Start with curated resources

I’d start by saving myself time.

I’m slightly biased here because this is exactly why we built The Global Move. I genuinely believe it’s one of the best hand-curated resources for relocation job opportunities on the internet today. Over the last year and a half, my team and I have manually reviewed and published more than 7,000 relocation-friendly jobs here on Substack.

The point isn’t that you have to use our archive. The point is that somebody has already done the filtering for you.

Instead of spending hours going through thousands of vacancies on large job boards trying to find the ones that offer relocation, I’d rather spend that time preparing better applications, researching companies, or improving my LinkedIn profile.

The same applies to any high-quality curated resource. Whether it’s a newsletter, a niche job board, or a community, someone has already spent time separating the signal from the noise.

Go from global to local

Next, I’d stop searching globally.

Instead, I’d choose two or three countries where I genuinely want to live and go much deeper into those markets.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be much more focused and informed. You’ll naturally discover local English-speaking job boards such as Arbeitnow, MeetFrank, Landing.Jobs, Welcome to the Jungle, TokyoDev, Japan Dev, SwissDevJobs, and many others, as well as international recruitment agencies, communities and newsletters.

You’ll also start understanding not only how hiring works, but also work visas, salaries, and many other local details. Which companies hire internationally. Which recruitment agencies specialise in tech. Which communities are active. Which conferences people attend.

Recruiters notice when you explain why you genuinely want to move to their city, not just their country. On the other hand, writing something like “I’m willing to relocate anywhere in Europe” can easily become a red flag. It may suggest that your main goal is to leave your current country rather than build a life in a specific place.

It’s much easier to understand one market well than twenty markets poorly.

I also think this approach makes networking much more natural. Instead of trying to build connections all over the world, you start building relationships in the places where you actually want to live.

Follow relocation-friendly companies

I’d build a watchlist of companies that regularly hire internationally.

Instead of opening a job board every morning, I’d focus on companies that have a proven history of hiring people from abroad and follow them over time.

There are many ways to find those companies. We recently published a list of more than 170 companies with a history of hiring internationally. You can also use public resources like the UK Register of Licensed Sponsors, the official Dutch IND recognised sponsors list, H-1B visa sponsor databases in the US (for example, H1BGrader), LinkedIn, or simply search for relocation stories from engineers who’ve already made the move.

Once you’ve built that list, keep following those companies. Read about what they’re building, check their career pages from time to time, and pay attention to company news.

Don’t ignore companies that don’t mention relocation

One mistake I see quite often is people applying only for jobs that explicitly mention visa sponsorship or relocation support. I think that’s too limiting.

At the same time, I wouldn’t suggest applying for every vacancy either. If a job description is written entirely in German or Swedish, or it clearly says that you already need to have the legal right to work in that country, I’d probably move on.

Some companies don’t advertise relocation even though they’re willing to relocate the right candidate. Sometimes it’s because of local regulations. Sometimes it’s just how they write their job descriptions.

For example, in Ireland, employers may need to first advertise a role to the local and EEA market before they can hire someone from outside the EEA. As a result, some vacancies may not mention relocation even though relocation may still be possible.

If you genuinely believe you’re a great fit, don’t automatically skip the opportunity just because relocation isn’t mentioned.

Big Tech deserves a special mention

The same idea applies to large international companies like Meta, Google, Uber, Stripe and many others.

They don’t usually advertise themselves as relocation-friendly companies because they don’t need to. But they already have the legal processes, budgets, and experience needed to relocate people from all over the world.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that these companies can always make exceptions for exceptional candidates. Even if a particular role doesn’t mention relocation or visa sponsorship, I’d still apply if I genuinely believed I was a great fit.

The worst thing that can happen is receiving a rejection. The best thing that can happen is finding a company that already knows exactly how to relocate international talent.

That said, I definitely wouldn’t build my entire strategy around Big Tech. Competition is incredibly strong. But I also wouldn’t remove those companies from my list just because they don’t explicitly say they’re hiring internationally.

Focus on companies where you can add the most value

Another strategy I’d use is focusing on companies where I know I can add the most value.

One of the easiest places to start is with competitors of your current employer. They’re often solving similar business problems, using similar technologies, and looking for people who already understand their domain.

The idea is to move beyond simply searching for relocation-friendly companies.

Instead, look for companies where your previous experience becomes a real competitive advantage.

I’d also approach those companies differently. Something along the lines of: “I know you don’t hire many people from abroad, but I think this could be a good exception, and here’s why…” Then explain why your experience is relevant, what problems you’ve already solved, and why you believe you can add value to their team.

It’s a much stronger position than simply saying, “I’m looking for relocation.”

Referrals matter more than ever

I also think referrals have become even more valuable over the last few years.

Companies receive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications for a single role. It’s only natural that a recommendation from someone they already trust receives more attention than another anonymous application.

At the same time, I don’t think referrals are something you get from sending a random LinkedIn message asking a stranger to recommend you.

Most referrals are built on trust.

That trust can come from many places. Previous colleagues. Open-source projects. Technical communities. Speaking at conferences.

The good news is that referrals can sometimes open doors that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Even if a company doesn’t regularly hire internationally, an internal recommendation may encourage them to take a closer look at your application.

I won’t pretend there’s a simple formula for getting referrals. There isn’t. But if you’re planning your relocation over the next year or two, I think building genuine relationships in your professional community is one of the best long-term investments you can make.

Use LinkedIn strategically

I still think LinkedIn is one of the most valuable tools for relocation, but probably not for the reason most people think.

Of course, you can apply for jobs there, but I usually prefer applying through the company’s own careers page whenever possible.

For me, LinkedIn is much more than a job board.

Make sure you’ve enabled the “Open to Work” setting without the green profile photo frame and selected the countries where you’d like to work. Recruiters across various tech companies still spend a significant amount of time searching LinkedIn using Boolean searches and specialised sourcing tools. If your profile is invisible, those opportunities never have a chance to find you.

I also use LinkedIn as a research tool. Before applying, I look at how many international employees already work at the company. I check whether there are people from my home country, because they’re often the best people to talk to about what it’s really like to work there. It also gives you a good sense of whether the company is genuinely international or mainly hires locally.

LinkedIn is also one of the best places to monitor companies over time. Follow recruiters, hiring managers, and engineering leaders. You’ll often learn about hiring plans long before a vacancy appears on a job board.

Consider internal transfers

Another strategy I’d seriously consider is joining a company with offices in multiple countries.

Large international companies often have internal mobility programmes that make relocating much easier once you’ve already built trust inside the organisation.

For example, if your long-term goal is the United States, moving on an L-1 visa after spending a year in one of the company’s international offices is often a much more predictable path than hoping to win the H-1B lottery.

The same idea applies in Europe and many other parts of the world. Sometimes the easiest way to relocate isn’t changing employers. It’s changing offices.

Think long-term

One thing I’ve noticed over the last couple of years is that relocation often takes much longer than people expect. We’ve had subscribers who found a job within a few months, and others who needed almost two years.

That’s why I’d think beyond my next application.

Maybe the best move today isn’t relocating immediately. Maybe it’s joining an excellent startup, working on AI infrastructure, distributed systems, or another area that’s becoming increasingly valuable internationally. A year or two later, your profile may look very different to employers abroad.

The same applies to remote work. Finding a remote job with a company based in your target country can also become a stepping stone. Once you’ve established yourself as a valuable employee, discussing relocation or using an Employer of Record may become a much easier conversation than asking a company to relocate someone they’ve never worked with before.

Sometimes the shortest path isn’t the most direct one.

Think beyond the standard application process

One strategy I don’t see discussed very often is trying to avoid the standard path altogether.

Today, almost everyone follows the same process. They find a vacancy, tailor their resume with AI, submit the application through the ATS, and wait.

Thousands of other candidates are doing exactly the same thing.

I’d still apply through the official process, but I wouldn’t rely on it as my only way into a company.

Instead, I’d look for non-linear ways to get noticed.

Maybe it’s connecting with the hiring manager. Maybe it’s contributing to one of the company’s open-source projects. Maybe it’s building a small prototype using their product and sharing your ideas with the team. Maybe it’s writing about a technical problem they’re trying to solve. The exact approach matters less than finding another reason for someone inside the company to notice you.

There isn’t a formula for this, and every company is different.

The goal isn’t to bypass the hiring process. The goal is to create another opportunity for someone inside the company to notice you before your application becomes just another resume in a queue.

Final thoughts

None of these ideas guarantees you’ll relocate.

The market is simply too competitive for anyone to promise that.

What they do is improve your odds.

If I had to leave you with one final thought, it would be this: don’t look for one magical website, one perfect strategy, or one AI tool that will suddenly get you a relocation offer.

Build your own system instead.

Use curated resources to save time. Focus on a small number of countries. Follow companies, not just vacancies. Invest in your LinkedIn profile. Build genuine relationships. Think long-term. And don’t be afraid to use a non-linear path when everyone else is following the same one.

None of these strategies is revolutionary on its own. But together, they put you in a much stronger position than simply sending another hundred applications.

I genuinely hope this article saves you some time, helps you discover opportunities you wouldn’t have found otherwise, and gives you a few ideas worth trying.

Good luck.

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 156 handpicked jobs: 116 relocation-friendly positions and 40 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,900+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 28 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Front End – 8 roles

• Full Stack – 17 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Mobile – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 16 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Data & AI – 34 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 13 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Security – 6 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Gaming – 2 roles

• Product – 6 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Design – 3 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Other – 12 roles (incl. 1 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (150+ jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

The Global Move has partnered with Manifest, a trusted U.S. immigration law firm, as part of my effort to make this newsletter as useful as possible for those planning a move abroad for work.

Manifest specializes in U.S. employment-based visas — EB-1, O-1, National Interest Waivers, and more.

What sets Manifest apart, beyond their team’s extensive experience and track record of helping hundreds of professionals obtain work visas and green cards, is their personalized approach. They match you with an attorney based on your specific needs and provide dedicated one-on-one support to build the strongest possible petition.

Learn more about Manifest

Hey there 👋

Continuing my series of country guides, I’ve put together a list of helpful links for those of you considering a move to the United States 🇺🇸.

Here we go:

✅ Destination research

To relocate wisely, start by doing some research.

• Visas: https://relocate.me/visas/united-states + Manifest Law’s work visa guide or the official Visa Wizard tool to help you determine which U.S. visa category best matches your purpose of travel.

  • Popular searches:

    • O-1 visa (a relocation path without an employment offer)

    • H-1B visa (an employer-sponsored work visa)

    • L-1 visa (an employer-sponsored intra-company transfer visa, often used by multinational companies to relocate employees from an overseas office to the United States)

    • TN visa (a work visa available to eligible Canadian and Mexican citizens)

• Taxes: https://relocate.me/taxes/guide/united-states

• Take-home pay calculator: https://relocate.me/taxes/calculator/united-states or https://www.smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

• Cost of living: https://relocate.me/cost-of-living/united-states + Numbeo + ask on Reddit (example thread)

• Healthcare & insurance options:

  • General overview: https://relocate.me/healthcare/united-states + Manifest’s “Do Immigrants Get Free Healthcare?” guide

  • First-hand insights: Ask locals and expats on Reddit (example thread)

• Average salary data: https://relocate.me/salaries/united-states-average-salary

• Developer salaries in the USA: Levels.fyi / Built In / Blind + Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey + Reddit and Quora for first-hand insights

• Ask questions about living and relocating to the United States:

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/MovingToUSA

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSF (San Francisco)

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea (San Francisco Bay Area)

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions (a general Q&A community covering virtually every topic, with questions about the United States being very common)

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions (one of the largest software engineering career communities, with many discussions focused on the U.S. tech job market)

✅ Job search: U.S. companies hiring from abroad

Finding a job in the United States from abroad continues to be challenging. Unlike many European countries, the U.S. does not offer a general job seeker visa that allows foreign nationals to relocate first and look for a job. There is also no digital nomad visa. In most cases, you need an employer willing to sponsor your work authorization before you can move.

The most common route for international talent remains the H-1B visa, but obtaining one is far from guaranteed. Because demand greatly exceeds the annual quota, most new H-1B applications are selected through a lottery. Combined with the cost, uncertainty, and administrative burden of sponsorship, many employers are reluctant to sponsor candidates unless they have highly specialized skills or significant experience.

The H-1B isn’t the only path, however. Depending on your background and circumstances, other visa options may be available to you. For example, I often see job postings from U.S. companies stating they are willing to sponsor the L-1 visa (for intracompany transferees) or the O-1 visa (for individuals with extraordinary ability).

Regardless of the visa category, your chances are generally higher if you target companies that already have experience hiring internationally and established immigration processes.

Here are some U.S. companies I’m aware of that, based on publicly available info (primarily current job descriptions), appear to be open to sponsoring work visas for international hires:

• Anthropic – https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic

• Reflection – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/reflectionai

• Exa – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/exa

• Retell AI – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/retell-ai

• Thinking Machines Lab – https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/thinkingmachines

• Verkada – https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/verkada

• Halliday – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/halliday

• AGI – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/agi-inc

• fab2 – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Fab2

• Capital One – https://www.capitalonecareers.com/search-jobs

• Sim – https://www.sim.ai/careers

• Solstice – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/solstice

• TextQL – https://textql.com/resources/careers

• Edgescale AI – https://edgescaleai.com/careers/#openings

• HUD – https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hud

• OpenAI – https://openai.com/careers/search

There’s also a website called H1BGrader where you can explore historical H-1B sponsorship data by company, role, location, and more. You can use it as one of the resources to identify employers that may be willing to sponsor H-1B visas.

❗ Important note about U.S. job posting lingo:

When reading job postings, don’t assume that every mention of “H-1B” means a company is willing to sponsor candidates from abroad. In many cases, employers simply state that they offer visa sponsorship without specifying the type. Others explicitly mention H-1B transfers, which generally means they’re willing to hire someone who already has H-1B status and wants to transfer to a new employer. That’s different from new H-1B sponsorship, which typically requires the employer to register the candidate for the annual H-1B lottery (unless the position is cap-exempt).

Similarly, “relocation support,” “relocation assistance,” or “relocation package” does not necessarily mean visa sponsorship. In many cases, it only refers to financial assistance for candidates who are already authorized to work in the U.S. and are relocating from another U.S. city or state.

On the other hand, phrases such as “visa sponsorship available,” “we sponsor work visas,” or “immigration support” are generally much stronger indicators that an employer is open to hiring international candidates.

✅ Job search: Local job sites

Beyond LinkedIn, here are some local job platforms worth checking out:

• Built In (one of the largest job platforms for startups and tech companies, with dedicated job boards for cities such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, Boston, and Chicago)

• Levels.fyi Jobs (a tech-focused job board featuring software engineering and other technical roles at startups and major tech companies, along with salary insights)

• Y Combinator Jobs (job opportunities at hundreds of startups backed by Y Combinator)

• Dice (one of the largest U.S. job boards dedicated to technology professionals)

• Indeed (one of the largest and most popular job search sites in the United States, featuring job listings across virtually every industry)

For tech and startup jobs, I also recommend:

• Ask HN: Who is hiring? (a monthly Hacker News hiring thread where startups and established tech companies post engineering and other technical roles directly; for example, Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026))

• Wellfound (not limited to the United States, but with a large portion of its startup job listings coming from U.S.-based companies)

✅ VC and startup news

• https://techfundingnews.com/category/us

• https://techcrunch.com

• https://strictlyvc.com

• https://news.crunchbase.com

✅ Expat experiences & insights

• Interviews with people who relocated to different U.S. cities

• 3 main ways to get a job in the U.S. & relocate if you are a software engineer or in tech in general

• The complete guide to moving to the U.S. and getting your dream job in tech (published in 2019, so some information is outdated, but still contains valuable insights)

• Ask HN: EU devs who moved to the States for work, has it been worth it?

That’s it! If you know of any other helpful U.S.-related resources worth adding to this list, please share them in the comments.

Best,

Andrew

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 150 handpicked jobs: 109 relocation-friendly positions and 41 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,900+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 30 roles (incl. 12 remote)

• Front End – 4 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Full Stack – 14 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Mobile – 3 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 18 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 6 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Data & AI – 27 roles (incl. 7 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 18 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Security – 6 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Gaming – 2 roles

• Product – 5 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Design – 10 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Other – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (150 jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

I’ve been involved in tech recruitment + relocation since 2011. Over the years, I think thousands of software engineers have relocated using different resources, articles, tools, and products that I’ve built.

Relocation has always felt like my thing. My vocation. I’ve also relocated several times myself. That search for more freedom has always been an important part of my own journey.

The reason I’m writing this article is simple. I constantly receive LinkedIn messages, emails, and comments asking more or less the same question. I try to answer as many of them as I can via my articles, but after repeating myself enough times, I thought it would be better to put everything in one place. Think of this as a bonfire conversation. I just want to honestly share how I see things.

I’m not writing this because I think I have all the answers. I don’t. The relocation market is changing quickly, and like everyone else, I’m trying to understand it while it’s happening.

Before getting into my own observations, let me give you 3 numbers.

1. According to the latest report from Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system (ATS) used by tech companies, the average number of applications per job opening has nearly doubled since 2022. This report includes data from 6,000 companies and 640M applications.

2. At the same time, recruiting teams have become much smaller, which means recruiters now handle roughly 5 times more applications individually than they did only a few years ago.

3. The last number comes from the Dutch IND (immigration agency). I took the Netherlands, but I believe that’s pretty much the overall picture. According to their data, the number of highly skilled migrants (aka software engineers, designers, scientists, etc) moving to the Netherlands in 2025 is almost half (13900) of what it was in 2022 (26200).

None of these numbers tells the whole story on its own. Together, though, they describe a market that’s very different from the one many of us became used to.

Companies receive far more applications than before. Recruiters have far less time to carefully review each one. At the same time, the number of actual relocations has generally gone down. There isn’t a single reason for that. AI is changing how software teams work and, as a result, how companies think about hiring and team growth. The post-Covid era of cheap money is over. Wars, politics and the broader economy all play a role.

The result is that getting a job with relocation support has become more competitive every year.

That doesn’t mean relocation is disappearing. It doesn’t even mean it’s becoming rare. But I do think the game has changed. And from many of the conversations I have every week, I’m not sure everyone has realized that yet.

What’s changed?

As we discussed earlier, relocation opportunities are becoming something closer to a luxury ticket. Or maybe a better comparison is the Olympics. The opportunities are still there, but the competition is much tougher than it used to be.

One thing, however, hasn’t changed. Companies still hire people from abroad for exactly the same reason they always did: they can’t hire the people they need locally.

Before 2022, when the tech market was booming, almost every company wanted to hire more developers. More engineers meant more products, faster growth and, in many cases, a higher company valuation. If you were a software engineer with 5 years of experience, you usually had plenty of opportunities both locally and internationally because companies genuinely struggled to fill those positions.

Today the situation is different. The market has shifted back towards employers. Tech was an exception for quite a few years, but many job seekers still behave as if that exception is the normal reality. It isn’t.

Recently I received an email from a front-end developer with around 7 years of experience. He told me he wanted to move abroad for a better future, a more stable economy, better education and more security. I completely understand those reasons. They’re good reasons to relocate.

The problem is that they’re your reasons, not the employer’s.

Employers don’t relocate people because they want to improve someone’s quality of life. They relocate people because they need to solve a hiring problem.

Companies no longer need to hire many developers simply to justify higher valuations. When they decide to sponsor someone today, they’re usually looking for expertise they genuinely can’t find locally, someone who brings unique value and someone who’s motivated enough to make the move worthwhile.

If all those things come together, the result may well be a better quality of life for you and your family. But that’s the outcome, not the reason.

That’s probably the biggest shift I’ve seen over the last few years.

I often compare today’s relocation market to getting into a top university.

You need to work for it, but more importantly, you need to treat it as an investment.

If you want to build a career abroad, you need to invest in it just like you invest in learning new skills, improving your health or building a business. Sometimes I’m surprised when people tell me they dream about relocating but don’t want to invest even a small amount into understanding how today’s market works.

What to do then?

I keep hearing these days is that people send hundreds of applications without getting a single interview. That’s very different from a few years ago. Back then, some of the most popular discussions on Reddit were about choosing between multiple offers or deciding which country to move to. Today, the biggest challenge is getting noticed in the first place and securing that first interview. Hopefully with a tech recruiter, not an AI screening tool or a coding test upfront.

That’s why I don’t think sending even more applications solves the problem.

For years, the market encouraged volume. Easy Apply became the default. Now we have AI tools that promise to apply for hundreds of jobs while you sleep. That might work in some local markets, especially if your profile is already very strong. I don’t think it’s a good strategy when you’re competing internationally.

Instead of trying to send more applications than everyone else, I’d focus on standing out from the people who are applying for the same job.

That could be a stronger resume. A thoughtful cover letter. Better preparation for interviews. Referrals, cold outreach or networking. Speaking at conferences. Building a visible online profile. The exact method matters less than understanding the goal. You need to cut through the noise.

The second thing I’d do is make it easier for opportunities to find me.

Recruiters still search LinkedIn every day, even at companies like Meta and other Big Tech companies. They actively look for engineers with specific skills using Boolean searches and various sourcing tools. Not every company openly advertises relocation support, but many are still willing to make exceptions for exceptional candidates. If you’re invisible, those opportunities never have a chance to find you.

The third thing I’d seriously consider is whether employer sponsorship is the only path to relocation.

If your goal is to build a life in another country, there are often other ways to get there. Talent visas. Job seeker visas. Digital nomad visas. Studying abroad. Employer of Record arrangements with an existing remote employer. They all require different levels of effort and investment, but they also give you something valuable in return.

Imagine you’ve already moved to the country, have the legal right to work there and are applying locally instead of internationally. The conversation with employers immediately becomes different. The pool of companies becomes much larger because visa sponsorship is no longer part of the equation.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of investment. Sometimes investing more upfront creates many more opportunities later.

One more thing has also become much more important over the last few years.

When you apply overseas, you’re competing on a global market. You no longer have the “home field” advantage of already living in the country or speaking to recruiters face to face. That makes positioning yourself much more important than before.

Understanding your strengths. Explaining why you’re different. Building relationships with recruiters and people who’ve already relocated. Learning how to present your experience in a way that’s relevant to the market you’re targeting.

Those things have always mattered. Today, they matter even more.

Know where you want to go

One thing I’ve been noticing more and more is people telling me they want to relocate anywhere.

I completely understand where that comes from. There are dozens of reasons why someone might want to leave their home country. Better opportunities. Better quality of living. More stability. More freedom. Those are all perfectly valid reasons.

The problem is that if you translate those reasons into today’s job market, they become much less convincing from the employer’s perspective.

5 years ago, saying “I’m happy to relocate anywhere” wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage. Companies desperately needed engineers and were willing to sponsor visas simply because they couldn’t hire enough people locally.

Today the market is different.

Recruiters have become much more selective about who they sponsor. Technical skills are still important, of course, but they can evaluate those during interviews. What they’re also trying to understand is your motivation. Why this company? Why this country? Why now? Those questions matter much more than they used to because employers have many more candidates to choose from.

That’s one of the reasons I think it’s much better to have 1 or 2 countries you genuinely want to move to instead of trying to relocate anywhere.

Once you know where you want to go, you naturally start learning about that place. You read about the housing market. Maybe you’ve already visited the country. Maybe you’ve spoken at a conference there or have friends who relocated before you. None of those things will get you hired on their own, but together they show that you’ve thought seriously about the move.

I don’t think the world has become less welcoming. I simply think employers have far more choice than they did a few years ago. And when people have more choice, they naturally become more selective.

Clarity about where you want to go, and why, is now a competitive advantage.

Why I’m still optimistic

I also don’t want to make dramatic predictions about where the market is going. Nobody knows that. AI is moving incredibly fast, companies are still figuring out how to use it, and every few months something changes the conversation again.

What I do know is that relocation isn’t disappearing. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be in this niche.

I still see companies hiring internationally. I still see people changing their lives through a job opportunity abroad. The market is smaller than it used to be, and it’s definitely more competitive, but the opportunity itself is still there.

For many years, relocation was almost a natural consequence of being an experienced software engineer. Companies competed for talent, recruiters reached out constantly, and many candidates had several international offers to choose from.

Today’s market rewards something different.

It rewards people who understand why companies hire internationally. People who invest in their careers. People who stand out instead of blending into hundreds of applications. People who adapt instead of hoping the market goes back to the way it was.

If even one person reads this article, changes how they approach relocating abroad and starts treating it as a long-term investment instead of a lottery ticket, I’ll consider it worth writing.

That doesn’t mean you’ll get an offer next month. It doesn’t even mean you’ll get one this year. But I do think you’ll make better decisions.

Good luck! 🤞

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 160 handpicked jobs: 120 relocation-friendly positions and 40 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,800+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 27 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Front End – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Full Stack – 16 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Mobile – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 16 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 8 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Data & AI – 37 roles (incl. 12 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 9 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Security – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Gaming – 3 roles

• Product – 8 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Design – 3 roles

• Other – 21 roles (incl. 7 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (160 jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

To put things into perspective, I’ll give you a swift rundown of how the market’s going in 2026. You should know that getting a job that relocates you, sponsors your visa, and pays for the move is harder than it was in 2021. It reflects the wider shift in software engineering: the hiring frenzy that followed the pandemic, when nearly every company was racing to build digital products, has cooled off. I said as much in my forecast for 2026, and again in the piece on how to write a cover letter, where one engineer wrote his letter and waited six months for the interview. That’s the pace of the market today.

But that’s part of why I’m optimistic. That’s mostly how one path, getting a job with relocation, holds today. But how about other paths, like using a talent visa to relocate and work abroad, without an employer sponsoring you? Because that’s what talent visas are for.

This is an update from a 2025 guide, and it leaves me with a feeling of opportunity. I added more countries than last time, and the list is curated: I did the research, I talked to people, I read the Reddit threads and the Facebook groups, and I kept only the ones I rate. So if you are set on leaving your country, consider this path alongside the classic one where a company pays your way, and keep it firmly in mind.

What a talent visa actually is (and exactly who it’s for) 🎫

In case you have never come across a talent visa, here is the difference with other visas. With a talent visa, you do not need a job already lined up for the country to grant it. You also do not need to show you are billing a set amount every month, which is what a digital nomad visa asks of you.

A talent visa is a different pitch. You are telling the country you want to take you in, that your ability and your past performance can give them something they would appreciate. You are talking about where your career sits, where you stand in the industry, what you have already done. Likewise, you are talking about how good you are.

I remember writing a guide like this a year or two back and noticing that, for a certain country, two groups come out ahead with these visas: performance artists and software engineers. That is still the reality of them! If you are reading The Global Move, I am going to guess you are the second kind.

United States, the O-1 Visa 🇺🇸

According to Deel’s internal hiring data, which I broke down in my relocation-friendly jobs report, the O-1 is the most-used relocation visa for tech anywhere in the world, ranked number one ahead of the UAE, the Netherlands, and the rest. I hold that a little loosely, but it cuts both ways. The United States grants it, a country of roughly 330 million with a near-unmatched history of taking in talent from abroad, and it hunts for that talent in the best sense. The flip side is competition. The most requested visa is also the most contested.

The O-1 is the American talent visa, for people with “extraordinary ability.” You qualify with one major internationally recognized award, or by meeting at least three of the eight criteria:

• published material about your work,

• experience as a judge of others’ work,

• original contributions,

• authorship,

• a high salary against your peers,

• selective memberships,

• awards, and

• lead roles.

There is no cap and no lottery, unlike the H-1B, and it runs up to three years to start, with extensions. One point people get wrong: the O-1 has no self-petition. You need a US petitioner, though not a traditional employer. From what I found out in my research, it can be a US agent, which is how freelancers file, or a company you yourself own. I wrote a dedicated O-1 guide on all of it.

One piece of color. I know of two people who did their MBA in the United States in this newer political era, and both were already eyeing the O-1 as their way to stay. When people already working in the country treat it as their route to remain, the path clearly works, and the people deciding take it seriously. One caution I often repeat: do not focus only on the US. Remember that tech salaries in Switzerland run as high as American ones, a fact not many people know. Germany and France can offer a very high standard of living without a Silicon Valley paycheck. And The New York Times just ran a piece on San Francisco tech workers on $180k salaries struggling with the cost of living (I needed to rub my eyes when writing this! Imagine not making ends meet on $15k a month.) The O-1 is one door among many.

United Kingdom, the Global Talent Visa 🇬🇧

The UK Global Talent Visa is open to people in tech, academia, arts, and culture. The UK even hands these to musicians. You do not need a job offer. Most applicants first need an endorsement from an approved body that confirms you are the real thing, though if you have won an eligible award, you can skip that step and apply straight away.

Here is the update worth knowing because the previous version of this guide left it hanging. For the digital technology route, the endorsing body is once again Tech Nation. The organization wound down for a while, which caused a lot of “who signs off now?” confusion, but the Home Office handed the digital tech endorsement contract back to it in April 2025. (Still, it looks like the Tech Nation site was discontinued and you need to apply on the government’s official site.) The visa lets you stay up to five years at a time. If you come in as a well-known leader, you should settle in three years. If you come in as a promising leader, you should settle in five years.

France, the “Carte Talent” 🇫🇷

France renamed its program. What used to be the Passeport Talent is now the carte de séjour “talent,” or carte talent, after the 2024 immigration reform. It runs up to four years and renews, and your family can come with you on their own cards.

Be precise about which route fits, because this is where people trip. The genuinely no-employer routes are two: the “porteur de projet” card, where you found or run your own business, and the “renommée nationale ou internationale” card, for people with a real name in their field. The other talent routes, the salaried and Blue Card ones, need a French contract, so they are a different sort of thing. I was watching the NBA finals in June, and it struck me again that the most extraordinarily skilled and talented basketball player in the world is French. So my advice is this: do not apply to France on the strength of your jump shot. On the sports front, I do not rate your chances against that country. For everything else, it is one of the strongest options on this list.

Australia, the National Innovation Visa 🇦🇺

Australia is a genuinely sought-after place to land. Good weather in plenty of cities, a high standard of living, and software salaries that sit above some German pay rates. And there is a bedrock of established names to aim at, like Canva or Atlassian. It has long taken in qualified workers to fill its talent gaps, and engineers are squarely on that list. More Europeans move there for tech work than the other way around, and by some counts, a third of Australian tech workers speak a language other than English.

The talent route that needs no employer is the National Innovation Visa (subclass 858), and it grants permanent residency from the start, which puts it in a different weight class from most visas here. There is no points test. What there is instead is an invitation step: you file an expression of interest, the Department has to invite you before you can apply, and once invited you have 60 days to lodge. You also need a nominator with a national reputation in your field, an Australian citizen, permanent resident, eligible New Zealander, or an Australian organization, who signs your Form 1000. For tech people, the priority is called critical technologies.

I had a word with expats living in Australia, and I used their testimonies to compare against some online resources and share the following advice. The NIV, it seems, is a narrow door, kept for standout records. So most engineers reach Australia through its points-tested skilled routes, which are stricter: a degree, an English exam, and a points threshold that rewards experience most (the engineer I spoke with reached Australia with a different route altogether, which was an agreement between his university and the Australian government to give him a visa.) A software engineer with two years behind them can put in for the Skilled Independent Visa (subclass 189), though a stronger case wants three to eight years or more, and company sponsorship is the other way in.

Hong Kong, the Top Talent Pass Scheme 🇭🇰

I like putting options on this list that sit outside the usual European radius, and Hong Kong is a strong one. Its Top Talent Pass Scheme asks for no job offer at all. You qualify in one of two ways: a high income in the past year, around €280,000, or a degree from a top-ranked university, with the eligible list running to 200 institutions as of January 2026 (I love old school, 90s-like webpages like that one.) The top-income route now comes with a three-year visa, and seven years of continuous residence puts permanent residency on the table.

I will be candid about the limits of what I can tell you. I do not have a thorough read on how Hong Kong has shifted geopolitically over the last few years, so I am not going to crown it or write it off. What I can pass on, from people who have gone to work there, is that they land in a very strong expat community. You can build your hobbies, your friends, even your five-a-side football team out of people from almost everywhere: Asia, Europe, the Americas. On that basis alone, this is a very intriguing option in a very active, fast-moving city, and it is well worth a serious look.

United Arab Emirates, the Golden Visa 🇦🇪

The UAE Golden Visa has real talent routes that need no employer: scientists and researchers, creative talents, doctors, and top graduates, most of them on the ten-year card, each gated by an endorsement letter from the relevant authority rather than by a job. Some routes are also open to executives and skilled workers, but you need a job contract and a certain salary to qualify, so read carefully before you think you qualify!

When I researched the UAE for the digital nomad visas update, I ran into trouble just working out what they wanted. A page would not load, or the English version would crash. And the requirements were vague. They would tell you that you needed a degree from a top university and then not tell you which universities counted! So treat the UAE as a genuine opportunity, but go slowly, and confirm every requirement on the official ICP page before you count on anything.

A few more worth naming (Yes, 🇨🇦)

Three that do not get their own section but belong on your radar. Canada is loose pick here: it has no talent visa as such, but with a well-paying remote job and an EOR, you can move and work in North America legally. Singapore and its Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass deserve a mention for the same reason as Hong Kong. I always rate these very global, metropolitan hubs, and Singapore is one of the best of them. And the Chancenkarte, Germany’s Opportunity Card, is one of my favorite newer visas. It is a job-seeker one rather than a talent visa, so it lives in my Job Seeker Visas guide, but I wanted it here anyway because it is that good a route.

How to build the profile that gets you in

The visa is decided on what you can show, so grow the things you can show. Some items:

• Go to industry conferences, and speak at them if you can.

• Get published in places people respect.

• Keep an active GitHub. I used to lean hard on the “green squares,” the record of daily contributions, and I am no longer sure how much weight they carry. Nobody looks at 45 pull requests in a single day and thinks, “Wow!” More likely they think, “this person really knows how to use Claude Code,” which is not the worst thing to signal in 2026 either.

My most repeated piece of advice for 2026 is to make your material short and genuinely well-crafted. I wrote up how to do exactly that. Remember, the person reading is buying something (they are buying talent.) So show them what they came to read, and show them you did your homework. And as you can learn throughout the piece on how to prepare for an overseas move, start connecting with the people in the decision well before you apply. Use LinkedIn properly, and find a compatriot who has already been through it and can tell you where the potholes are.

Is this path for you? Think about it twice!

Before dedicating yourself to it, remember that taking the talent path will take a lot of effort (I’m sorry, I don’t see any shortcuts coming up soon.) So think about it before committing to it!

… but still, don’t forget about all those paths!

But I’ll be a bit at odds here. Even if you lock in and say that the talent path is for you, please don’t write off all the other options. There are so many!

For example, I talked about the education path before. I know an engineer who entered the Netherlands with no visa, went through the whole process, and is now a Dutch citizen near Rotterdam with a house he owns, free to work anywhere in Europe. I interviewed him for my piece on relocating through the university path.

Companies change locations, too! Catawiki, out of the Netherlands, just opened a relocation policy to Portugal. Lock onto one country with no roles in it, and you are the one who draws the curtain.

Just keep your options on the waiting list.

Thanks for reading, and I would love to hear in the comments if you have been through something similar and found the thing that made the difference! Good luck 🤞

I publish relocation-friendly tech roles every week at The Global Move, and we’re building the Internet’s biggest community for software engineers who want to live and work abroad or score a genuinely remote job. If you’re getting ready for your move, subscribe and start building your platform now.

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 160 handpicked jobs: 118 relocation-friendly positions and 42 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,700 jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 23 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Front End – 8 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Full Stack – 11 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• Mobile – 2 roles

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 15 roles (incl. 5 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 5 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Data & AI – 41 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 15 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Security – 2 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Gaming – 4 roles (incl. 1 remote)

• Embedded Development – 6 roles

• Product – 8 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Design – 6 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• Other – 14 roles (incl. 4 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (160 jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

If relocation is the only reason you want a job abroad, do not expect the company to be excited about hiring you.

That sounds harsh, and I know how it lands, because the desire to move is one of the most genuine and personal things a person can carry. I’ve spent years working with engineers who want to relocate, and I understand this drive.

But during an interview, that same desire can quietly work against you, and I want to make sure that does not happen to you.

This is the kind of impression you should avoid giving to recruiters!

The most common mistake, and please do not beat yourself up if you made it

After working so many years with people who want to relocate, I have watched the same thing happen again and again. Which is...

In interviews, candidates focus so hard on the idea of moving that they forget the person across the table is looking for someone who cares about what the company does, what the team is building, and where the product is going.

It is obvious why this happens, and it is honest. Most people answer relocation questions by talking almost exclusively about wanting to move abroad, seeking a better quality of life, higher salaries paid in a hard currency, and getting away from a difficult situation in their home country. Occasionally, there is the extra detail of a neighbor who claimed a Spanish passport and went to live abroad, while you have no second nationality to fall back on. All of that is true, in the sense that, I get it: it’s a massive motivator. Any recruiter who opened a search from Singapore, from the Netherlands, or from the Basque Country in Spain already knows it and already assumes it. So actually, if you think it this way… your wish to relocate is not a surprise to anyone.

Here is the problem. When that is the whole answer, you create the wrong impression of what you want and of whether you will be a good hire. You give the recruiter 3 quiet worries:

Read more

Hi everyone,

Time for a new weekly job list.

This week’s selection includes 155 handpicked jobs: 114 relocation-friendly positions and 41 international remote roles.

You can browse all of them on the Global Move Job Board if you haven’t already. The job board makes the process much more convenient and includes a searchable archive of 1,600+ jobs!

If you prefer exploring jobs directly on Substack, here’s the breakdown of this week’s selection:

• Back End – 25 roles (incl. 8 remote)

• Front End – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Full Stack – 8 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Mobile – 6 roles

• DevOps, SRE & Infra – 15 roles (incl. 3 remote)

• QA & Test Engineering – 8 roles

• Data & AI – 28 roles (incl. 6 remote)

• Engineering Management & Technical Leadership – 19 roles (incl. 4 remote)

• Security – 7 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Embedded Development – 6 roles

• Product – 4 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Design – 4 roles (incl. 2 remote)

• Other – 18 roles (incl. 8 remote)

If you’re new here:

I share ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs weekly on The Global Move:

👉 https://relocateme.substack.com/t/relocation-friendly-jobs

Starting in January 2026, each Thursday job list also includes international remote tech roles, alongside relocation-friendly positions.

This content is available exclusively to my paid subscribers.

Why subscribe to the paid edition?

• No more never-ending job searches (on LinkedIn). I bring you handpicked job openings, saving you hours of research.

• Access to the private job board, featuring a searchable archive of opportunities handpicked for The Global Move community.

• Access to exclusive content 🔒, including this curated list of companies hiring for tech roles with visa/relocation support.

• Support. Moving forward in your international job search is easier and faster when you have the right community.

The price of a paid membership is $15 per month.

If you have questions about the subscription, reach out to me at andrew@relocate.me. You can also DM me on LinkedIn, but please include a note when sending the invite.

How do I curate the list?

The job openings I list here – primarily tech roles – include visa sponsorship and/or relocation assistance, among other benefits.

Each job is hand-picked.

What does “handpicked” mean, and how do I source these jobs?

For over 12 years, I’ve been helping software engineers relocate. Over this time, I’ve built a system to find and identify companies that hire internationally.

First, I check publicly available registers of companies legally authorized to hire foreign talent. Then, I review publicly available data to see if a company has previously hired from abroad, analyze its careers page, and monitor its recruiters’ online activity. Additionally, I use the database of Relocate.me hiring partners from the past five years and activelly leverage Boolean search techniques to find relocation-friendly openings.

For international remote roles, I manually review every listing to make sure the company isn’t limiting candidates to a specific country. I focus on opportunities that can be done remotely from anywhere or across regions such as APAC, EMEA, or LATAM. I also check the company’s LinkedIn page to see whether its team is genuinely distributed across multiple countries rather than concentrated in a single location.

To access this week’s job list (155 jobs) and the job board with a searchable archive 👇

Read more

Planning a move abroad? We have partnered with Wise to provide a comprehensive international money solution for our community.

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Hey there 👋

Continuing my series of country guides, I’ve put together a list of helpful links for those of you considering a move to Finland.

Here we go:

✅ Destination research

To relocate wisely, start by doing some research.

• Visas: https://relocate.me/visas/finland + these two official sites:

  • https://um.fi/entering-finland, maintained by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs

  • Application Finder on the Finnish Immigration Service website, designed to help you determine the correct visa or permit type for your situation

• Taxes: https://relocate.me/taxes/guide/finland and/or https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/finland/individual/taxes-on-personal-income

• Take-home pay calculator: https://relocate.me/taxes/calculator/finland or the official one from the Finnish Tax Administration (Vero)

• Cost of living: https://relocate.me/cost-of-living/finland + Numbeo + ask on Reddit (example thread)

• Healthcare & insurance options:

  • General overview: https://relocate.me/healthcare/finland

  • First-hand insights: Ask locals and expats in r/Finland (example thread)

• Average salary data: https://relocate.me/salaries/finland-average-salary

• Developer salaries in Finland: Levels.fyi / Glassdoor + Reddit for first-hand insights (example thread)

• Ask questions about Finland:

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/finland (the largest Reddit community dedicated to Finland)

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/helsinki

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/espoo

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/nordiccountries (a subreddit for discussions about the Nordic countries, including Finland)

  • https://www.finlandforum.org

  • Expats & Foreigners in Finland (Facebook group)

• Other useful resources:

  • https://www.workinfinland.com/en (a Finnish government initiative that supports international professionals in finding job opportunities in Finland and provides information about relocating, working, and living in the country)

  • https://www.suomi.fi/guides/work-in-finland (a comprehensive guide that brings together the most important info and instructions from Finnish authorities for people planning to work in Finland)

✅ Job search: Companies hiring from outside Finland

Finland has one of Northern Europe’s most mature tech ecosystems. The country is particularly strong in gaming (Supercell, Rovio), telecommunications (Nokia), AI, deep tech (Varjo), and increasingly space technology (ICEYE). Its startup ecosystem is centered around Helsinki, Espoo, and Tampere, with Helsinki hosting Slush, one of the world’s leading startup and technology events.

English is widely used as the working language in many tech startups and multinational engineering teams, making it possible to build a career without speaking Finnish, especially in software engineering and other technical roles.

Below are Finland-based companies that, based on publicly available info (career pages and job descriptions), appear to have a track record of sponsoring work visas/relocating international employees:

• Sellforte – https://careers.sellforte.com

• Supercell – https://supercell.com/en/careers/?location=helsinki

• AlphaSense – https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/alphasense

• Wolt – https://careers.wolt.com/en/relocate-to-finland

• Remedy Entertainment – https://www.remedygames.com/careers

• Rovio – https://www.rovio.com/game-studios/rovio-finland

• Metacore – https://metacoregames.com/careers

• ICEYE – https://www.iceye.com/careers

• Sony Interactive Entertainment – https://careers.playstation.com/jobs

• Varjo – https://varjo.com/jobs

• Happeo – https://happeo.recruitee.com

• Zalando – https://jobs.zalando.com/en/where-we-work/helsinki

• ReOrbit – https://www.reorbit.space/careers

Other companies worth checking out:

• Aiven (while its current job postings don’t explicitly mention work visa sponsorship or relocation support, the company previously promoted its Finland-based job openings on Relocate.me)

• Nokia (one of Finland’s largest tech employers)

• KONE (a global engineering and industrial company headquartered in Finland)

✅ Job search: Local job sites

Beyond LinkedIn, here are some local job platforms worth checking out:

• Duunitori (Finland’s largest job marketplace, featuring vacancies across a wide range of industries)

• Jobly (a popular Finnish job board with opportunities at startups, scale-ups, and established companies)

• Work in Finland Jobs (a Finnish government initiative for international talent, featuring English-language job opportunities from employers looking to hire international professionals)

• Indeed Finland (the Finnish version of the global job search platform, featuring both direct employer postings and aggregated job listings)

For tech and startup jobs, I also recommend:

• MeetFrank (a platform widely used by startups and established tech companies in Finland to connect with potential candidates)

• The Hub (one of the leading job platforms for Nordic startups and scale-ups, with job opportunities across Finland)

✅ VC and startup news

• https://sifted.eu/countries/finland

• https://www.eu-startups.com/category/finland-startups

• https://www.vestbee.com/insights/tag/finland

• https://arcticstartup.com/category/country/finland

• https://nordicstartupnews.com

✅ Expat experiences & insights

• Foreigners in Finland: how’s life? (Reddit thread)

• Just how different is life in Finland for an American? (YouTube video)

• https://www.youtube.com/@GrownUpGirl93 (a YouTube channel by an Indian software developer who has been living and working in Finland since 2022)

That’s it! If you know of any other helpful Finland-related resources worth adding to this list, please share them in the comments.

Best,

Andrew