Hi HN - a bit of a personal post here. I'm an American citizen but due to some personal/family reasons I have to relocate to the EU this year.<p>I will be relocating without a residency visa, but there are a handful of visas out there that would allow me to work for a company <i>outside</i> the EU (eg "Digital Nomad" visas). The only thing I'd need is permission from the company to let me work from the EU and I could handle the rest of the visa/immigration challenges.<p>I'm hoping somebody out here could provide any insights or leads on companies hiring who are flexible on location. I've been attempting for months to find a fit but so far have come up short; hence why I am reaching out to the network here.<p>The HN community has been amazing over the years so here's hoping somebody out there will be able to help!<p>Roles I'm seeking are Customer Engineering positions (really any technical customer facing position) such as: Solutions/Sales Engineer, Support Engineer, Success Engineer, etc<p>Thanks all - wishing everyone a great week (contact info in my profile as well)
Your best bet is probably to form a business entity and work corp-to-corp as a contractor (client pays your contracting entity, which pays you either as an owner or employee) with a smaller company that is more flexible about things like this.<p>Big companies are capable of dealing with the complexities of having an employee in another country, but are usually not flexible about that sort of hiring. Small companies are flexible, but are not set up to deal with that kind of cross-border employment relationship.
I am not an accountant nor a lawyer but my hunch is that to engage with US companies from abroad you would either need to be transferred or apply for a job at an entity in the EU representing that employer or you would need to operate as a 1099 contractor (self employment).<p>1099 in EU may not be so bad, you would most likely still need to pay for access to national healthcare but it would be cheaper than US insurance. You will need to report your taxes with both the US and your country of residence, but there is a foreign income exclusion available that would make it so you didn't actually pay any taxes to the US besides what your employer owes. Again, not an expert, you might look into this further with your own research or consult a CPA that has experience working with Digital Nomads or citizen contractors working abroad.
It seems a lot of people go in to consultancy and start their own business under the Dutch American Friendship Treaty. If you're quick about it you can start a BV in the Netherlands, recruit yourself as director while you're still abroad, and get 30% of your income exempted from tax (until it's killed off). Let me know if you want an accountant referral. The Netherlands is great.<p>Your US taxes will be a pain, form 5471 etc. There's also groups like oysterhr.com, boundlesshq, deel, etc. that act as employer of record.<p>Edit: To explain, the DAFT treaty has a very small investment needed. It has not been raised with inflation.<p><a href="https://ind.nl/en/residence-permits/work/residence-permit-self-employed-person" rel="nofollow">https://ind.nl/en/residence-permits/work/residence-permit-se...</a><p>"""
You invest a lot of money (substantial capital) in your business. The level of this sum depends on the form of your business. For most forms, the IND requires a minimum investment of €4,500. See the rules on substantial capital investment.
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FWIW: I am based in Detroit. Founders are based in Vancouver, with one in Tel Aviv. Rest of the team (and company HQ) is in London. We are 100% remote with a small office space for gatherings in London.<p>So it is certainly possible. I believe a green flag for a company is that they will hire you regardless of where you are located. Some companies even prefer this, as it means you can have 24-hour coverage for critical systems with team members scattered all over the planet.<p>I don't have any recs or connections I can offer, but just wanted to share my experience to show that it is possible. I have also been a contractor since about 2018 so that helps. As a remote contractor you can inherently work from anywhere.
Which country are you relocating to ? Certain ones such as France don’t allow ‘digital nomads’ - there are workarounds but it inevitably involves paying taxes and social charges. Working cross borders can also be difficult- I’m English but have French residency but cannot work for a non-French (and possibly Ireland) without getting a blue card or getting my EU citizenship back which was stripped from me against my will…
If you're open to something slightly different there are many US government jobs in Europe for US citizens, and that can include engineering jobs, and technical jobs interfacing with customers - normally located around embassies & US/NATO bases.<p><a href="https://www.usajobs.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usajobs.gov/</a>
Most companies with 1k+ employees will have offices or at least contractors in different countries, adopting a "follow the sun" support model typically. I'd start by looking at public companies, or potentially companies (like Percona) who don't really have an office to begin with - pure remote.
Many smaller companies that use a PEO professional employer organization will be equipped to handle this.<p>Covering the night shift because of the time zones can be a competitive advantage for the types of rolls you listed. This is what my employer does, a handful of employees are in Portugal or other countries.
There are quite a few tech companies headquartered in the United States, but with employees globally.<p>37signals, MongoDB, GitHub, GitLab, Uber, and the AWS subsidiary of Amazon for example are some which I definitely know have (or had) remote employees in the Netherlands.<p>Protip: You will probably get quite some good leads when you search for remote jobs at the location you are relocating to at LinkedIn.<p>Good luck!
I'm sure HN's lawyer's will be on my ass for saying this, but you could take a remote role from an east-coast company and then simply proxy any mail to you in a western EU country while working US eastern time hours. I know someone that did this. If you're a night owl anyway it might work out well for you.
I tried to do a similar thing, but in New Zealand, for engineering or ML engineering roles, without success. The folks I know of that pulled it off either knew people from previously working together in-person or were special in some way - PhD in valuable niche, wrote a book.
The answer is yes, you can find roles like that. It would help if you link to your resume somewhere -- I'm not really interested in emailing you for it.
Just get a regular remote job and then set up a vpn from a US based location and just use that all the time. No one will ever know and maybe won’t even care.
>Ask HN: Help, any US-based companies that allow you to work from Europe?<p>"companies that <i>allow</i>"<p>The <i>wording</i> itself shows that the person saying it may have the mentality of, and meekly accepts, a master-slave relationship between employer and employee. Which in turn tends to perpetuate that idea, at least for those who are weak enough to follow the herd.<p>People need to get out of such weak-minded, weak-hearted and slavish ways of thinking, more so on a site like this, which is <i>ostensibly</i> about startups, entrepreneurship, etc.