European engineers often read a US job description far too literally. They see twelve bullet points of requirements, count how many they miss, and either talk themselves out of applying or pour a week into an application that was never going to clear a filter they did not notice. A US posting is really three documents stitched together: legal boilerplate, a hiring manager’s wish list, and a small number of hard filters. Knowing which line is which is most of the skill.
“Senior” does not mean what it means at home
Titles inflate in US tech, and they inflate unevenly. “Senior” at a 5,000-person company can mean five years and a narrow scope; at a 30-person startup it can mean you own a whole system alone. The years-of-experience line is usually the least reliable number in the whole posting. A requirement of “8+ years” is frequently a hiring manager’s rough proxy for “someone who has owned hard things,” not a hard cutoff. If you have the ownership and the depth, the exact year count is rarely what sinks an application.
The words that are just boilerplate
Large chunks of a US posting are copied legal and HR language that tells you nothing about the job. “Equal opportunity employer,” “other duties as assigned,” “fast-paced environment,” long lists of nice-to-have technologies, and “bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience” are mostly furniture. The technology wish list in particular is often aspirational: if you have seven of the ten listed tools and the core ones among them, you are a real candidate. Treating that list as a checklist you must complete is the single most common way good engineers disqualify themselves on paper.
The words that are real filters
A few lines are genuinely binary, and these are the ones to read carefully. “Must be authorized to work in the US” or “US-based only” is a real filter, though for contractor roles it sometimes means the company simply has not thought about non-US contractors yet. A required time zone overlap, such as “must work US Pacific hours,” is real and worth taking at face value. Security clearance, on-site or hybrid in a specific city, and “no agencies or contractors” are all hard. When a posting names a specific overlap window or a legal work-authorization requirement, believe it. When it lists ten frameworks, do not.
How to respond to a “US-only” posting
A posting that says US-based is not always a closed door, especially for senior roles where the company cares more about the work than the W-2. The move is not to apply blind through the portal, which will filter you out automatically. It is to reach the hiring manager directly with a short, specific message that leads with what you would do for them and acknowledges the contractor structure plainly. Many US companies have never engaged an EU contractor simply because no one walked them through how clean it actually is. That conversation, not the application form, is where the door opens.
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