DevEngine Whitepaper

If you lead technology, data, or digital in a growing company, you've probably felt this tension:

You need strong engineering and data teams to deliver ambitious roadmaps—cloud migration, new digital products, data platforms, better security. But the people you want are the same people being chased by global banks, tech giants, and big consultancies.

Roles stay open longer than they should. The best candidates juggle multiple offers. Internal teams quietly absorb the extra work and start burning out.

Remote and hybrid work have changed what's possible. You're no longer limited to one city or even one country. But that doesn't mean the answer is "hire everywhere and see what happens." You still have to think about time zones, regulation, culture, security, and how people will actually work together day to day.

This whitepaper looks at a simple question:

How can you combine Canadian and Latin American talent to build an engineering organization that's strong, sustainable, and not wildly over budget?

We'll walk through why both markets matter, where each is strongest, and how DevEngine helps companies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe use them in a way that feels intentional, not experimental.

Across financial services, wealth and asset management, fintech, healthcare, and other regulated or complex environments, a few consistent patterns emerge.

There is plenty of work to do. Cloud infrastructure to modernize. Legacy systems to unwind. Data platforms to build. AI use cases to evaluate, and the foundations to put in place. New customer-facing products to ship. But the mix of talent you need to do all of that—senior engineers, data people, DevOps, AI developers, architects—remains scarce.

Local markets are crowded. In places like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Seattle, London, Berlin, you're competing with household names. They have brand recognition, very deep pockets, and entire teams dedicated to talent branding.

Hiring cycles drag on. Average time-to-fill for senior engineering roles in major Canadian cities now exceeds 90 days. Even when you've got the budget, finding someone with the right skills, industry experience, and communication style takes time. Every extra round of interviews eats into your team's calendar. Urgent work doesn't wait.

And if you're in a regulated space, it's not just "can they code?" You're asking:

That's the backdrop for everything else in this paper.

For many of our clients, Canada is the anchor of their engineering and data strategy—even if they also hire elsewhere.

Canadian-based engineers and leaders are especially important when:

Canada has a deep pool of senior people across software, data, cloud, and architecture. The issue isn't whether the talent exists. It's how much of it you can realistically attract and afford, and how long you're willing to wait.

That's where having a focused partner for Canadian contract staffing and permanent recruitment makes a difference. You still decide who joins your team, but you're not fighting the sourcing and vetting battle alone—and you're not trying to figure out the whole market on your own while juggling delivery.

In short: Canada is where a lot of the leadership, high-trust, and sensitive roles should live. It's also where many of your most senior hands-on people will sit. The question is how to support them with enough capacity around them to deliver everything on their plate.

Latin America has changed dramatically as a technology region in the last decade.

Cities like Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Bogotá, Medellín, Santiago, Mexico City, and San José have become serious tech hubs. Engineers there work with the same tools, clouds, and methodologies as teams in Boston, Stockholm or London. Many already have years of experience with Canadian, American, and European clients.

For companies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, Latin America offers a few very practical advantages:

The goal is not to replace local talent. It's to make your budget work harder by pairing local leaders and key roles with strong nearshore engineers who are in sync with your working day.

Done well, nearshore LATAM doesn't feel like an outsourcing experiment. It feels like your team just became a bit more global. And it doesn't need to create new operational headaches: DevEngine works with your IT and security teams to define standard laptop profiles and configurations, then we procure, configure, and ship hardware directly to your new LATAM hires. When they start, they're logging into a machine that already matches your policies, tools, and access requirements—without your team having to figure out international shipping or remote setup.

There's no single right model. What works best depends on your industry, regulatory environment, and how your teams like to work.

Some organizations only hire in Canada through DevEngine. They want local contractors working on-site, or permanent hires who will grow with the company and move up the org chart. That's especially true for roles that interact closely with regulators, customers, or sensitive data.

Some clients are happy to build nearshore teams in Latin America only. They're fully remote, comfortable with distributed teams, and their policies allow nearshore workers as long as contracts, security, and access are handled correctly.

Many land on a hybrid model:

Over 70% of our clients operate hybrid models within their first year, typically growing from a single contractor to teams of 6-10 people as they see the model work.

Hybrid doesn't have to be complicated. The whole idea is to line up who you hire and where you hire them with the decisions you'd make anyway about risk, cost, and collaboration.

DevEngine Technology Ltd. is a Canadian-owned and operated firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

We help companies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe build engineering and data teams using both:

DevEngine maintains a 4.7/5.0 rating on Clutch, with clients consistently highlighting our ability to source the right talent quickly and our commitment to understanding their unique needs.

We work with a relatively small number of clients at any given time. That's intentional. It means founder-level and senior-level people stay involved in your account. You're not passed off to a rotating cast of juniors once the ink is dry.

At a practical level, we support four main kinds of needs:

Whether we're helping you hire in Toronto, or in Buenos Aires, the basic approach is the same.

We don't run a giant bench of generic consultants and then ask "who can we place next?" Every search starts with your specific context: the tech stack, the kind of systems involved, the level of stakeholder interaction, the constraints you're operating under.

We don't just skim CVs. Technical assessment is led by senior practitioners—people who have actually built and run production systems, not just read about them. If you're hiring a data engineer, another experienced data engineer will be in that interview.

— Director, People & Culture, Gradient MSP

For deeper roles, if we ask candidates to invest several hours into a take-home assignment, we pay them for it. It's a small detail, but it changes who is willing to engage with you and how seriously they take the process.

And we try very hard to keep the commercial side simple. You see clear rates for Canadian contractors. You see all-in monthly rates for nearshore LATAM engineers or teams that include the local employment side, HR, and operational overhead. No surprise extras later.

In practice, an engagement tends to unfold in a few steps.

First, we sit down with you—virtually or in-person—and talk through what's happening on the ground. Which teams are under pressure? What's on the roadmap over the next 6-12 months? Where are you stuck on hiring? Where do regulation and risk create hard boundaries?

From that, we can suggest where Canadian contractors or permanent hires make the most sense and where LATAM engineers could safely and effectively plug in. Sometimes the first step is just a single contractor in Canada to unblock a project. Sometimes it's a small nearshore pod around a Canadian architect.

We then handle the heavy lifting:

You meet the finalists, decide who you want, and we move into onboarding. On our side, DevEngine handles contracts, payroll, HR, and hardware. For Latin American hires, that includes sourcing and shipping laptops, applying your standard images and security settings, and making sure the machine is ready on day one. On your side, you bring people into your tools, standups, and delivery rhythm, just as you would with a local hire. Your team brings them into your tools, standups, and delivery rhythm.

A Canadian fintech needed to build a prepaid card application MVP within budget and timeline constraints. DevEngine assembled a seven-person team that delivered a fully-functioning iOS and Android application in seven months—including complex banking infrastructure integrations. The client noted: "They understood what we needed, offered immediate solutions, and were invested in the project's success."

From there, the work is about relationship and adjustment: checking in regularly, making sure the team structure still makes sense, and making changes before small issues become big ones.

The world you're hiring into isn't getting simpler. Budgets will always have limits. Regulation won't become less demanding. Talent will continue to be unevenly distributed. And AI will keep raising expectations for what your teams can deliver.

But you have more options than "fight for the same handful of local candidates as everyone else" or "outsource and hope for the best."

Canadian and Latin American talent, used thoughtfully, let you:

— Director, IT Services Company

DevEngine exists to help you design and execute that kind of talent strategy with as little friction as possible.