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87% of employers worldwide struggle to fill positions in their companies. This problem is even more severe when it comes to hiring experienced software engineers, which we at Alcor have been doing professionally for over 10 years. The need is pressing: 81% of large IT business executives aim to expand their IT headcount in 2023. For that, it’s necessary to access foreign tech talent pools with the most potential. One such direction is Romania, an Eastern European country with the second-largest IT sector and economy in the CEE region.
I’m Maryna Panchuk, Head of IT Recruitment at Alcor. We assist product tech companies in launching their R&D offices in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Together with IT recruiters in Romania and other countries, Alcor finds top tech talent.
If you’re interested in recruiting Romanian software developers, you’re probably wondering about the pros and cons, cooperation peculiarities, and the best way to hire them. Keep reading, and you’ll learn all that and even more, including reliable data on the average software engineer salary in Romania.
Why Hire Developers in Romania?
The reasons to hire Romanian coders or turn to dedicated teams in Romania are countless, but we are going to focus on those that matter the most to product IT companies and startups from abroad:
Big development pool
In 2023, Romania is home to 200,000 IT specialists and ranks #4 in Europe by the number of people employed in ICT after Poland, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. On top of that, over 10,000 STEM graduates join the ranks of the Romanian IT workforce every year.
High level of education
Being a member of the European Union, Romania can provide access to the top European tech universities for its students. Moreover, the country has at least 27 universities that prepare engineering, programming, cybersecurity, and other IT specialists. The most prominent are the Politehnica University of Bucharest, the Politehnica University of Timisoara, and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, according to world university rankings.
Similar work culture with Western developers
Romania is only 2-4 hours away by plane from France, Italy, Spain, and all the rest of Western & Nordic Europe. Such proximity to leading centers of education and culture influences Romanian developers, so they quickly adopt Western values, patterns of behavior, and workplace ethics. Thus, programmers from Romania are easy to work with for Western European and American clients.
Good English proficiency
According to the EF English Proficiency Index, Romania is in the top 15 countries in the knowledge of English. In Europe, the country is in 13th place out of 34 countries. Each year, more and more Romanians improve their English, so communication with local developers is becoming easier.
Attractive government tax incentives
Regarding tax incentives for the IT industry introduced by the government, software development specialists who work in Romanian IT companies may be exempt from personal income tax if their gross salary doesn’t exceed the monthly limit of 10,000 Lei, inclusive, i.e. $2150. The portion above this limit is subject to a 10% income tax. Additionally, companies engaged exclusively in R&D and innovation activities are exempted from corporate income tax for 10 years.
Low salaries
Let’s compare React.js developer salaries in Romania and other Eastern European countries. We will see that the programmer compensation of middle React.js front-end coders in Romania is the lowest – $21,000 per year, in Hungary – $30,000, in Ukraine – $36,000, in Poland – $46,000, and in the Czech Republic – $48,000. In comparison to the USA, product tech companies that work with Romanian coders save from 4 to 6 times on salaries per year, so Romania is one of the most affordable locations in terms of IT services in the world. See a more detailed comparison of software engineers’ salaries in Romania and America later in the article.
2 Challenges While Working with Romanian Developers
The first disadvantage you should consider when hiring Romanian developers is the time difference between your country and Romania. If you’re based in the United States and have an Eastern Time Zone, you’re 6 hours behind Romania. That is why it’s essential to use effective IT project management tools like Asana, Trello, Jira, or Slack to handle task assigning for Romanian developers successfully. But even without project management tools, Romanian programmers are easy to manage because of their efficient time zone adjustment skills as a result of decades of working with American customers.
Secondly, Romania has only 21 million residents and only three major tech hubs. The biggest tech hub of Romania is Bucharest, while the other two are Cluj-Napoca and Iași. Thus, the workforce in the ITC sector is saturated in these cities, which results in higher competition in recruitment. Nevertheless, you may consider this problem mitigated due to remote work, which lets you hire Romanian developers from different parts of the country. Also, you may opt to work with a seasoned IT recruitment services provider with insider knowledge of the Romanian tech market and developers to forget about any complexities of hiring.
Romanian Software Developer Portrait
Romanian coders are praised for their reliable technical expertise, high English proficiency levels, and communication skills.
Thanks to Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Iasi tech hubs, as well as a favorable business environment (244 startups and counting!), Romanian devs have hands-on programming experience on top of their computer science degrees. What’s more, Romania is no stranger to innovation. The overall industry yields results in AI, the future of programming, cybersecurity, IoT, FinTech, and embedded software development.
Apart from English, an average Romanian IT specialist can often be fluent in French and Italian. Such cultural exchange allows for a mix of business values. On the one hand, Romanian employees appreciate formality and are open to following clearly stated rules. On the other hand, they also value personal relationships and trust.
Romanian Developer Salaries
Let’s take a look at Romanian software developer salary in different tech spheres.
| Sphere | Average Gross Annual Income, USD |
| Big Data | $36,000 |
| Blockchain | $41,500 |
| Video Game | $31,000 |
| Java | $38,500 |
| RPA (Robotic Process Automation) | $38,000 |
| Web | $22,000 |
| VR | $43,000 |
Sources: Glassdoor, Erieri
The highest-paying spheres are VR and Blockchain: they top the ranks with an average of $43,000 and $41,500 programmer salary in Romania. Java, RPA, and Big Data come next, with yearly wages amounting to $38,500, $38,000, and $36,000, respectively. Finally, a Web Software Developer salary in Romania is considerably lower — $22,000 annually. Now, how do Romanian salaries reflect against remuneration in the USA?
Romanian vs American Developers. Skills and Salary Comparison
The 2022 Pentalog Report, which is based on SkillValue developer ranking, has determined that Romania and the US are in the top 5 countries with the best developers. Romania takes third place, while the United States holds fifth place. At the same time, Romanian programmers have a powerful tech stack that consists of JavaScript, Python, C, C++, C# and mobile technologies, according to the report. On the other hand, coders from the USA are stronger in DevOps and have the highest daily rate in the world.
Now, let’s look at the table containing data about the average base annual salary of different developers in Romania and the US. Note that junior programmers have 1-3 years of experience, middle coders have 3-5 years of experience, and senior developers have 5-8 years of experience
| Positions | Junior | Middle | Senior | |||
| Romania | USA | Romania | USA | Romania | USA | |
| Full-Stack Software Developer |
$31,000 | $97,000 | $49,500 | $128,000 | $67,000 | $150,000 |
| Front-End Software Developer |
$21,000 | $86,500 | $47,000 | $118,000 | $58,000 | $127,000 |
| Back-End Software Developer |
$21,000 | $100,000 | $49,000 | $125,000 | $58,000 | $151,000 |
| Mobile Developer |
$23,000 | $80,000 | $36,000 | $98,000 | $46,500 | $162,000 |
| Game Developer |
$18,000 | $80,000 | $31,000 | $100,000 | $64,500 | $140,000 |
| Data Scientist |
$31,000 | $110,000 | $44,000 | $152,000 | $75,000 | $170,000 |
| DevOps Developer |
$23,000 | $110,000 | $46,500 | $145,000 | $89,000 | $170,000 |
| Software Development Engineer in Test |
$21,000 | $60,000 | $29,000 | $106,000 | $40,000 | $128,000 |
| Embedded Developer |
$18,000 | $95,000 | $31,500 | $113,000 | $46,500 | $142,000 |
| AI Developer | $27,500 | $60,000 | $34,000 | $73,000 | $69,000 | $93,000 |
Sources: Glassdoor, Jobber.ro
As you can see from the compensation table of Romanian vs American developers, Romanian developers’ rates for full-stack specialists are $31,000-$67,000, whereas, in America, they are $97,000-$150,000. The Romanian developers’ salary for back-end engineers is also from $21,000 to $58,000 per year, while the same specialists in the US earn $86,500-$127,000 and $100,000-$151,000, respectively. Senior Romanian app developers with mobile engineering skills have a salary of $48,500, while in the United States, their counterparts receive $162,000 per year. Romanian game developers receive a compensation of $31,000 on average; at the same time, game engineers from the US have a salary of $100,000 per annum.
In conclusion, doing software development in Romania is more cost-efficient compared to the United States. Moreover, Romanian developers are better at many sought-after technologies, hence the higher quality of software they build. If you’re up for recruiting senior, lead, and C-level IT professionals from Romania, our company Alcor is here to assist you.
What You Should Consider to Hire Romanian Developers
Once you’ve set your mind to hiring seasoned software developers in Romania, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- What technical skills do you lack in your company?
- How many programmers do you need to hire?
- What level of seniority should they have?
- How much money are you ready to spend on salaries and employee maintenance?
- Are you ready to manage them yourself or via a third party?
The answers to these important questions will give you an understanding of what cooperation model with your developers will be the best for you. Overall, hiring Romanian programmers is almost the same as hiring Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, or other developers from Central & Eastern Europe. The most important things are the availability of the needed technical skills, experience with technologies that you require for a project, level of spoken and written English, and the right soft skills to fit into your corporate culture.
4 Most Common Ways to Hire Romanian Developers
Let’s describe the most popular cooperation models with Romanian programmers for international companies.
1. Partnering up with a professional recruitment services provider
Recruitment service providers are companies that can hire developers in Romania who meet your requirements completely. You can assign your recruitment partner to consult you on the Romanian IT market, find the best local software engineers, and help you draw up individual employment contracts.
Our company, Alcor, specializes in IT staff recruitment in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and other Eastern European countries and can help you with everything from tech hiring to legal & compliance support. For over a decade of delivering IT recruitment and other types of services, our team has managed to help People.ai, Grammarly, BigCommerce, Samsung, Sift, Ledger and many other companies succeed in their R&D operations in Eastern Europe.
We offer R&D and IT recruitment services. At Alcor, we have separate research and recruitment teams that focus on hiring senior Romanian developers for our customers. We thoroughly consider every candidate before offering their CVs – to save your time and connect you with compatible software engineers from the first attempt. Throughout the hiring process, we adopt different metrics to measure performance and speed up IT recruitment.
These techniques were of great help when we were hiring 30 talented Ukrainian developers in 6 months for BigCommerce, one of the biggest e-commerce solutions providers in the world. After failing to cooperate with outsourcing agencies, the company found our solution. In addition to recruitment, we found a perfect office for their R&D team, took care of their finances and taxes, and handled all legal operations, including the adoption of GDPR requirements.
And in case your company is new to Romanian developers, we can offer you help in promoting your employer brand in Romania. We already did it for Tonic Health in Ukraine, a product IT company from Silicon Valley that develops software for patient data collection. Our employer branding campaign for Tonic Health helped them overcome the problem of offer rejection from senior IT specialists, which led to hiring 5-6 developers per month.
2. Hiring Romanian developers in-house
Big technological companies such as Google, Samsung, Huawei and Amazon established their branches in Romania to hire local developers in-house. They spent millions of dollars to form huge departments of competent recruiters, test different recruitment strategies and streamline this process. All of this sometimes takes months or years, so if you don’t have this much time to recruit Romanian coders by yourself, you may consider other cooperation models.
3. Cooperating with outstaffing vendors
This employee engagement model applies not only to IT giants but also to middle-sized or even small-sized companies. The main idea of outstaffing is that you cooperate with an outside provider from Romania that lets you lease a dedicated software team. This development team is often already formed by your vendor, so you don’t have to worry about their level of expertise and training. On the flip side, such teams demonstrate low levels of dedication to the client’s product and are more difficult to manage because they don’t perceive you as their primary employer.
Romanian developers hired via outstaffing will probably require more investments than you initially planned if your project needs adjustments and fixes, which happens in all projects. However, the worst part is that working with these programmers may lead to the loss of core internal expertise and investments because it’s not your team that develops software.
4. Working with outsourcing providers
Outsourcing is often mistaken for outstaffing, while in reality this model offers you to fully delegate custom product development to your provider. You might save costs and free up more time for other core tasks that you’re responsible for if you decide to do IT outsourcing to Romania. But in the long run you may face hidden costs for the services that you didn’t request in case your provider is unreliable.
Such cooperation might even put your sensitive data and IP rights protection at risk if the security of your vendor’s system is weak. For many product software companies, outsourcing might not be the best option to hire Romanian developers.
To sum up, the differences between cooperation models boil down to terms, costs, and security & control levels. Whichever model you choose to hire developers in Romania, ensure it suits your needs in these categories.
How About Your Own R&D Center in Romania?
Alcor offers R&D center services in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.
This is an all-in-one solution for launching your R&D team in a foreign location: we provide you with full-cycle IT recruitment of top-notch coders, EOR for software development service, legal & compliance support, employer branding, as well as take care of the office lease, equipment procurement, and WFH setup. So far, so efficient: 98.6% of our candidates successfully pass the probation period and stay with our clients for 2.5 years on average.
Ready to try? Reach out to us as a client and get a detailed overview of software engineer salaries in Romania for the positions you need.
FAQ
How many developers are there in Romania?
As of 2023, Romania has more than 200,000 software engineers and comes fourth in Europe by the number of people employed in ICT.
Why should you hire Romanian programmers?
First of all, coders in Romania are well-educated because of the variety of education options in Romania and the European Union. Secondly, Western companies find them easy to communicate with due to similar work ethics, and a high English level. Finally, they have low payroll income taxes and the lowest salaries in the CEE, which makes Romania one of the most financially attractive IT hubs in Europe.
Are there any disadvantages of hiring Romanian software engineers?
It might be difficult to work with programmers from Romania if you’re from the United States or Canada because of different time zones. Plus, the Romanian IT sector is mostly based in three cities which adds up to the saturation of the local IT market. Luckily, you can address this with two solutions mentioned in the article.
What is the difference between Romanian & American developer rates?
The rates of developers in Romania are usually smaller by up to 4 times than the rates of American programmers. For example, a middle data scientist in Romania earns $44,000 per year in general, while a middle data scientist from America receives $152,000.
What is the most secure & efficient way to hire developers in Romania?
The most effective way of cooperating with Romanian coders is via a professional recruitment services provider. You can also hire Romanian developers in-house through internal recruiters, or cooperate with outsourcing/outstaffing vendors.