Why AI engineers are hard to hire, and what helps
When an AI engineering search runs five months, the instinct is to fix the process. Usually the problem is the profile, and it calls for a different approach.
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Hiring LATAM developers means bringing engineers who live in Latin America onto your team, working your hours on your roadmap, through one of three arrangements: a named person in a named role, a squad designed to shrink as AI carries the repetitive work, or an engagement where part of the fee depends on results. The country you hire in is a supporting detail. The decision that shapes everything else is which of those three arrangements fits your team.
Most guides to hiring in Latin America start with the map and the price list. That order made sense when the main argument was cost. Today the more common reason teams look south is that a role has been open for months, and the profile they need, often in AI, security or data, is scarce at home. For that problem, the question is less "which country is cheapest" and more "which route finds the person and keeps the work under my direction."
This guide covers why teams hire in the region, the three ways in, where the talent is, the steps from brief to first pull request, and what keeps good engineers on your team.
Teams hire Latin American developers for three practical reasons: shared working hours, depth of talent in the profiles that are hardest to fill, and engineers who already work with the tools your team uses. Price used to lead that list. It is a weak reason to choose a hire, because a cheap seat that stays empty, or turns over in four months, is the most expensive option you have.
Working hours that overlap. Mexico City runs on UTC−6 all year, since Mexico dropped daylight saving time in 2022, and São Paulo runs on UTC−3, since Brazil dropped it in 2019. Bogotá and Lima sit in between. For a team in the US, that means most of the region's tech hubs share most of the working day, so standups, code reviews and incident calls happen live instead of overnight.
Depth in the scarce profiles. The Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index (ILIA 2025), produced by Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence and the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, places Chile, Brazil and Uruguay as the region's "pioneers," with scores above 60 points and a lead in infrastructure, talent and innovation. The same report is candid about the limit: a shortage of advanced training and the emigration of specialists keep the region behind the global average in human capital. Advanced AI profiles exist in the region, and they are in demand there too.
Formation in the fields that matter now. In Brazil, the national technology industry association, Brasscom, names data analysts and scientists, AI and machine learning specialists, and information security analysts as the most important professions for the coming years. Its own numbers show the gap: between 2019 and 2024 the market needed 665,403 professionals, while 464,569 graduated between 2018 and 2023.
The conclusion is practical. Latin America is a strong place to find engineers, and the strongest profiles are contested locally as well as globally. A search there works best with a partner that already knows where those profiles are.
There are three ways to add engineers from Latin America to your team, and they map to three situations rather than three products. In all three the engineers and the employment model are the same. What changes is how you buy and how the risk is shared, and you can start in one and move to another.
1. Staff augmentation: one named role. You know the skill and need the person. A partner finds the engineer, employs them where they live, and your team directs the work. This is the most common route, and the guide to what staff augmentation is explains when it fits and when it doesn't. Variants include several roles at once and contract to hire.
2. AI-augmented teams: more done with fewer people. A squad starts at around six engineers and is designed to shrink as the knowledge of your business turns into prompts, evaluations and playbooks your team keeps. It works when the work compounds; when it doesn't, the AI-augmented teams page says the honest move is to convert to traditional staffing.
3. Outcome-based engagement: part of the fee tied to results. As DevLatam's home page puts it: "You pay less up front. The rest is tied to the numbers we agreed, measured at the end of the period — so we carry part of the risk with you."
Two questions decide which one fits. Is the hard part finding the person, or employing someone you already found? And do you want to direct the work, or receive a result? The page on ways to fill the role walks through the four options for any engineering position, including hiring directly and using an employer of record.
Whichever route you choose, someone has to be the engineer's legal employer. With DevLatam, the home page answers it in one line: "We are their legal employer. Payroll, compliance and employment obligations sit with us, in the country where they live." The page on who legally employs them covers what transfers and what stays with you.
Each country guide below goes deeper into its talent pool and its hubs. Use them as data for your search, not as the reason to hire.
Argentina and Colombia also have large developer communities, in Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Medellín among other cities. For scarce specialties, the right country is rarely the one you already tried: it is the one where that specific profile exists.
The process from open role to first pull request has six steps. Most delays happen in steps 1 and 4, and both are on the hiring side.
Write down what the role has to do, what it integrates with, who it reports to and what success looks like in six months. How DevLatam works puts it plainly: twenty minutes of that beats a two-page job description. If you're hiring for a mobile app, "Swift and Kotlin" is a skill list; "ship the payments flow on both platforms by Q2" is a role.
Decide between the three routes above before the search starts. Changing from one role to a squad halfway through resets the search.
Coding tests measure something real, but not the thing that usually fails. They don't show whether someone can hold an unfamiliar system in their head or ask the question that reveals the requirement nobody wrote down. Ask candidates to walk through something they actually built: the constraint, what they chose, what they would do differently. People who have done the work answer with specifics. For AI roles, where the vocabulary is easy to learn and hard to tell apart from experience, see the guide to hiring AI developers in Latin America.
The single most common reason a good candidate is lost is a week without an answer. If your panel can't meet for two weeks, start the search when it can.
English level varies by person more than by country. Test it in the interview itself, in a technical conversation, not with a generic score. Speak with previous employers about reliability and how the person handles ambiguity.
Access, a first task with a clear definition of done, and one person on your side who answers questions. The 30-day onboarding playbook lays it out week by week.
Retention starts with treating the engineer as part of the team, not as a contractor on the side. Good engineers in Latin America have options, and the profiles you most want are the ones most likely to receive a counteroffer.
Pay for the market, not the discount. Research current compensation for the specific role and seniority. A salary set to "save" on the hire is the first thing a competing offer exploits.
Offer growth. Access to courses, certifications, conferences and harder problems. Engineers stay where they keep learning.
Communicate like one team. Same channels, same rituals, same information. Use the tools your team already uses (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira) and keep the remote engineer in the decisions, not only in the tickets.
Recognize the work. Celebrate shipped features and solved incidents in public. Recognition doesn't always have to be monetary.
Respect the working day. Overlapping hours make it tempting to stretch meetings into evenings. Don't. Burnout is the quiet cause of most early departures.
Show the path. Make clear what it takes to grow into a senior or lead role, and give regular feedback on the way there.
Keep the knowledge in your systems. People leave, including your own employees. Documentation, tests and decision records reduce what a departure costs, regardless of who employs the person.
There is no single rate: salaries vary widely by country, profile and seniority, and scarce profiles follow a global market. Compare options by the total cost of the position instead: the salary, the months the seat stays empty, your team's interview hours and the cost of a hire who leaves early.
No single country wins for every role; the right one is where your specific profile exists. For AI, the ILIA 2025 index ranks Chile, Brazil and Uruguay as the region's pioneers. Brazil and Mexico have large, established hubs, and Argentina and Colombia also have large developer communities. The country guides above go deeper.
Freelancers fit short, well-defined tasks; a partner fits a long-term seat on your team. Freelance platforms work when you can manage the person directly and accept the turnover. For a lasting role, you need someone vetted, employed and expected to stay. With DevLatam, you still interview whoever you want, and nobody joins without your yes.
Yes, and those are the profiles where a partner helps most, because they are scarce locally too. Decide first which one you need: AI, data and security engineers solve different problems. DevLatam's engineers also arrive with the ACL and DataArt group's frameworks and playbooks, so in the site's words "the first pull request looks like the tenth."
Hiring LATAM developers works best when you choose the arrangement first and the country second. One named role, an AI-augmented team or a fee tied to results: each asks something different of your team, and each fits a different situation. To see how staffing compares with hiring directly, setting up your own entity or using an employer of record, read ways to fill the role, or start directly with filling a position.
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