How to hire Ukrainian Developers and Data Scientists?

[Mark_V_Ferraro]

My Company is an Artificial Intelligence group that has come out of a big bank in New York and we have some ties to Ukraine. We are developing a new product. We have a team in New York and we are looking to start an IT office in Ukraine and will begin hiring talent in Kiev, starting with a full stack developer who has OCR experience and can code in Python, along with a data scientist. Anyone who can get us started with some direction would be great. Thanks.

[vot88]

Hi.

Many Ukrainian developers are working as private entrepreneurs, so you can set a contract with them directly. The taxes for them are pretty low (5% of income + social security of approximately $100 per quarter).

I'd recommend to start with the website djinni.co to search staff. That is an anonymous (for candidates) job search portal. they ask employer to pay some percent of an employee monthly salary in a case of successful hire). That is the fastest way to get in touch with candidates without paying a hiring agencies.

Good luck!

[maxbanton]

Hi! There are strong IT developers community in Ukraine, especially in Kiev. As a software developer I can recommend to post your job offers to these websites: https://jobs.dou.ua and https://djinni.co. Cheers!

[madd]

Hey Mark,

Since you want to start small and don't need tens of devs a month, I believe you have two decent options:

• Hire an agency: it's more of a shoot-and-forget approach, that comes with a price. You risk the same agency luring away your hires after the end of the agreement, you might get a subpar professional but with good connections… you get the idea. Decent agencies I know of are VPTeam, Lobby X, Indigo, but surely there are more.
• Hire the first few by yourself. I'd go this way to get a feel of a market, especially if you're going to increase your presence later. One of the less known tools to simplify UA hiring is called Djinni, and I love it. The concept is that you "shop" through anonymized developer profiles, and then pitch them with your position. Pros are that you only pay 50% of a base monthly salary after a successful hire, and Djinni's approach attracts the developers who you might not reach in any other way. The main con is that it's time-consuming and sometimes fails to yield results in the first days.

Hope it helps!

[Mark_V_Ferraro]

Thank you. These are very helpful suggestions!!!

[111301]

Hi Mark!

From the law perspective it’s practically possible to establish an office in Ukraine and hire devs as private entrepreneurs (PE) under service contracts. Your contracts with PEs shall be properly drafted so that they are not viewed as employment relations, you should also have strong intellectual property clause and tax issues covered by such contracts. I have an extended expertise in such projects for numerous clients. If you may need end-to-end legal assistance, including legal drafting, launching Ukrainian office, or fixing any formalities with Ukrainian authorities you may contact me at di.kondratyeva@gmail.com.

Kind regards,
Diana