Seattle is considered to be one of the best tech areas in the US and a serious contender with the San Francisco bay area. This is thanks to many out of town companies setting up shop in the area as well as having booming homegrown startups of its own. Many well known tech companies are headquartered in Seattle, among the most popular and well known are Microsoft, Expedia, and of course Amazon. Along with a small number of US companies, these Seattle firms are becoming software kings in Spain, as they have access to a strong and growing talent pool. One way of achieving this without too much operational hussle is to set up software development hubs in Spain through team extension services.
Why Set Up a software development hub in Spain?
Health tech startup Valant, also based in Seattle, reached out to Zartis in 2016. A leading provider of cloud-based technology for the healthcare sector, the company has been in business for more than 10 years. One of the main challenges they faced was is in hiring top class software engineers. Valant only wanted to hire engineers with great skills and the right personality, but it’s not always easy to do this in a highly competitive recruitment market. Over the last five years, one of its toughest challenges has been in hiring software engineers, says Chief Technology Office, Ryan Donahue. “We’ve had an explosion of technology companies coming into Seattle and setting up engineering centers, which created a bit of a problem from a talent demand and supply perspective, especially if you’re looking for highly talented engineers that have some experience working with cloud-based infrastructures”.
Dedicated Development Teams Through Zartis
For this reason, Valant started to explore other options and decided to partner with Zartis as the company that would help them hire in Europe – eventually setting up a software development hub in Madrid through our dedicated development team service.
In 2012, Amazon chose Madrid as their very first software development hub outside of the U.S. During the first year, Amazon hired many highly qualified senior professionals as well as chief engineers, product managers, software and test automation engineers from the local market.
Spain’s tech scene has a lot going for it given the number of investors and startups in the country. It’s also the perfect place and time to establish an extended development team. There are many engineers and developers who have gone abroad to Dublin, London and Berlin and have come back with a refined command of the English language. Presently, English is the language of business, right across Spain. The talent pool here is abundant and highly skilled. In short, Spain offers world class developers and engineers at very competitive rates. Francois Nuyts, President and Managing Director of Amazon.es stated, “We plan to continue investing seriously and creating jobs in Spain. We have already hired hundreds of incredibly prepared professionals onto our team and we are looking to hire hundreds more.”
