The average time to fill a senior engineering role in the US is four months. That number hasn’t improved in three years. Companies are spending more on recruiting, writing better job descriptions, moving faster through interview rounds — and still coming up empty. The obvious explanation is that there aren’t enough senior engineers. The real explanation is more uncomfortable.
The pipeline was built for a different market
From 2015 to 2022, zero interest rates made hiring cheap and competition for talent fierce. Companies inflated comp, expanded teams past what the product needed, and optimized their hiring processes for speed and volume. When rates went up, hiring froze — but the comp expectations didn’t. Senior engineers who were worth $130K three years ago now expect $180K plus equity, because that’s what the market taught them they’re worth. They’re not wrong to believe it. But the math has changed.
The result is a market where experienced engineers are expensive, mobile, and scarce — and where the companies that can move quickly are the ones that have already pre-built their search infrastructure. Most Series B and C companies haven’t. They post a job, wait six weeks, get ten applications worth reviewing, run four interview rounds, lose their first choice to a counter-offer, and start over.
The tenure problem compounds everything
Average tenure for a senior US software engineer is 18 months. That means you’re not just filling a role — you’re filling it again in a year and a half. The institutional knowledge walks out the door. The onboarding cost hits again. The roadmap slips while the seat is open. Most engineering teams aren’t understaffed because they haven’t hired enough people. They’re understaffed because they can’t retain the people they do hire.
This is a structural problem. Posting on LinkedIn, increasing recruiter headcount, or adjusting the salary band by $10K doesn’t fix a structural problem. It buys time.
The geography of senior talent is wider than most teams have looked
The US market has operated as if senior engineering talent only exists within commuting distance of San Francisco, New York, and Seattle — or within the remote-work networks those cities already anchor. What that ignores is a generation of engineers in Central Europe who were trained at rigorous institutions, built systems at companies most US developers have never heard of, and are working in environments where 3–4 year tenures are the norm rather than the exception.
Czech and Slovak engineers working remotely with US tech companies aren’t a workaround. They’re a different kind of hiring decision — one that solves the tenure problem and the availability problem at the same time, without requiring you to win a bidding war.
If you’re a CTO or VP of Engineering currently sitting on an open senior role, see what a pre-vetted Czech or Slovak engineer looks like. No retainer, no upfront commitment — just an honest conversation about whether the fit is there.