Toptal earned its reputation as the premium freelance network. Fewer than 3% of applicants make it in, and in most engagements you're introduced to a matched specialist within 24 hours. That's great when you need senior work on a deadline, especially with a two-week trial and a second candidate if the first doesn't fit.
But that flexibility exists because nobody is being hired. You engage an independent contractor from a global network, and in the standard engagement Toptal isn't the employer of record.
If the developer sits in Brazil, works your hours, and takes direction from your team lead for two years running, a labor court can rule the relationship was employment all along, and the back contributions and penalties land on you. The fix is to employ the person through your own entity in their country or a separate employment provider. And Toptal will discuss bringing someone in-house, but on terms negotiated case by case, once you already depend on the person.
Plus, the network spans over 100 countries with no time zone matching by default, so whether your developer joins standups or answers overnight depends on who you're introduced to.
The nine platforms below fall into three groups. Some source full-time hires you employ yourself, some employ them for you, and a few are rival marketplaces for short-term specialist work.
|
Platform |
Hiring Model |
Best For |
|---|---|---|
|
1. Strider |
Dedicated, embedded hire |
Building a long-term LATAM team you manage directly |
|
2. Revelo |
Dedicated, embedded hire |
Scaling a nearshore team up and down monthly |
|
3. Arc |
Freelance or full-time |
Taking a hire from contract to full-time on one platform |
|
4. Lemon.io |
Freelance contract |
Startups hiring senior developers without a minimum commitment |
|
5. Turing |
Freelance contract |
Filling multiple engineering roles at once |
|
6. Gun.io |
Freelance or contract-to-hire |
Senior contract hires with ongoing technical oversight |
|
7. Upwork |
Open marketplace |
One-off projects you source and screen yourself |
|
8. BairesDev |
Managed delivery or staff augmentation |
Enterprises that want a vendor to own end-to-end delivery |
|
9. Deel |
You source, Deel employs |
Employing and paying talent you've already found |
Strider finds and vets dedicated engineers in Latin America who become a core part of your team over months and years, working four to eight hours of daily overlap with U.S. hours. They embed themselves in your daily work, joining standups and learning how your team makes decisions, plus accumulating product knowledge that helps them make meaningful contributions instead of just supporting a sprint.
Engineering is where the network runs deepest, and it also covers cybersecurity, product, design, data, marketing, finance, and sales when you need to hire around the team.
Searches start with an intake call that collects what the role needs and what you're looking for in the person filling it. Anyone screened against it has already met a floor of three years' experience and clearance to work remotely for U.S. companies.
Recruiters then question candidates on the specific stack, English teachers score a recorded speaking assessment, and a live conversation covers motivation and how someone works with other people.
A subject-matter expert handles technical vetting from there, working through a project the candidate built and pushing on the decisions inside it as deep as the role calls for. They'll also follow up on whatever the candidate says rather than using a script, which helps catch anyone relying on AI.
Strider's engagements primarily run from three months to multiple years, with a focus on long-term hires that stay dedicated to a single company instead of rotating between accounts or splitting hours.
Keeping someone that long is part of Strider's ongoing job, which is why a named account manager stays with the account for its full length. They're accessible through Slack or email as needed, as well as for weekly meetings, and can help with what falls between your team and Strider's without an obvious owner.
Strider is also the legal employer, which means contracts, payroll, local taxes, benefits, and compliance sit on its side, along with the exposure that comes with getting any of them wrong. Recruiters hand all of that back to you, leaving you to choose between a contractor agreement that gets riskier the longer someone works like an employee, a standalone EOR, or your own entity in their country.
Strider makes the most sense when the role is permanent, the person reports to you, and standing up an international employment function isn't something you want to take on. If you’re looking for someone to cover a role temporarily, then their long-term focus might not be the cleanest fit.
For more information, check our Strider versus TopTal comparison.
Strider is free to get started and free until you hire. You can review curated candidates and run interviews before committing to anything. Payment only starts once someone signs, which puts the incentive on a match that lasts.
Cost is quoted per role. You can get an estimated cost through its savings calculator. Simply pick a function, a role, and a seniority band, then it returns an approximate fully-loaded monthly total.
"Strider helped us avoid the typical hiring headaches and delivered candidates that actually made a difference in our team. Our 100% retention rate speaks for itself, the people we hired through Strider are still with us and performing at a high level." — Kyle Gashler, Engineering Manager at Zamp
"When I reach out and say I need someone, I'm seeing resumes within two days. From ask to onboard, it's about 30 days end-to-end, which includes our comprehensive screening process." — Connor Tunney, Director of Product Optimization at Sentinel U
Revelo places senior LATAM engineers into U.S. engineering teams as full-time embedded hires. Your engineer works a full week on your roadmap, while the agreement covering them runs month to month with no term attached. Opening a search costs nothing and there's no placement fee, so billing starts when someone actually begins working, and a first hire comes with a two-week trial.
Keeping the commitment that light means Revelo carries the employment side permanently, which it does through its own PEO infrastructure across 18 Latin American countries. Payroll, taxes, benefits, legal and IP protection, hardware, and even office space all sit with Revelo, so it’s like hiring someone locally.
Behind that sits a network of 400,000-plus developers, each working within two hours of U.S. Eastern so they can join your standups and deliver work alongside the rest of the team. In-market recruiters match you with candidates who are identity-verified, tested against their specific stack, and interviewed for English and soft skills before they're placeable. That leads to a shortlist within 72 hours, with most hires happening in about 14 days.
Revelo’s depth concentrates in engineering and product, across full-stack, backend, QA, data engineering, AI/ML, and prompt engineering. Teams that would rather not hire at all can have Revelo assemble and project-manage a senior squad against a spec instead, and a separate arm of the business also supplies datasets, evaluations, and post-training work to AI labs.
However, Revelo doesn’t cover roles outside engineering and product, so a marketing or finance search won’t bear the kind of results you’re hoping for. Support after a placement is also lighter than the hiring side, with the model built around filling roles rather than working through problems or friction that arise between an engineer and the team.
Revelo makes sense for a team whose headcount follows the roadmap, expanding for a push and contracting after a launch without a renegotiation on either side.
Revelo offers a calculator that estimates costs by role and seniority, billed month-to-month with no locked-in contract, free to start with payment due only if you hire. Each rate is an all-in per-developer figure that the company says bundles compensation, PEO coverage, benefits, recruiting, and vetting.
● G2: 4.7/5 — Based on 162 reviews
Arc runs a global hiring marketplace where one vetted pool covers three engagement types. The same developer can be brought on hourly, part-time, or permanently, so a search can open before you've settled which the role actually needs. Coverage extends past engineering into design, marketing, product, project management, and support, drawn from a network of 450,000 people across 190 countries.
That flexibility matters most when a contract works out. A freelancer already inside your codebase can move onto your payroll as a permanent hire without starting a new search somewhere else, and Arc runs both routes as distinct products rather than treating full-time as a variant of freelance. Freelance candidates arrive in as little as 72 hours, while a full-time role takes closer to 14 days.
Either route can be unwound cheaply. Freelance engagements open with a trial of up to two weeks, a full-time hire that isn't working inside three months gets you another candidate at no charge, and nothing is owed until someone is actually hired.
Matching runs through HireAI, which screens incoming applications and contacts the strongest candidates directly, with a dedicated recruiter attached to every engagement. While the first screening pass lets more than half of applicants through, English screening and the technical interview bring it down to about 2% in the end.
But Arc doesn't employ anyone itself. Payroll, compliance, and employer-of-record coverage route to third-party partners, so a cross-border hire means a second contract and a second party accountable for it. Its multi-continent talent pool also means there's no guaranteed U.S.-hours overlap, so async roles will fare better over time.
With that in mind, Arc works better for a team that needs more than engineers and hasn't decided whether a role is contract or permanent, but wants both paths open from one search.
Arc charges nothing until you hire, then bills by engagement type.
Freelance work is paid by the hour at the talent's own rate, which varies by role, experience, and location. Permanent placement is a one-time fee tied to the hire's annual pay.
Lemon.io puts its bench in front of you before anyone asks for a call. Profiles carry a photo, a country and time zone offset, years of commercial experience, and a stack broken out by years per technology, drawn from developers working across Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Reaching that bench takes four rounds. A pre-screen covers CV and LinkedIn review, an AI-led screening call, and a role-specific technical task. Communication and composure under ambiguity get tested in a recruiter interview after that, and a senior engineer from Lemon.io's own community runs the final live problem-solving session, peer cross-reviewed once it's done. That session weighs how the candidate uses AI, watching for what they delegate to a model and what they can defend themselves.
Roughly 1 in 100 applicants clears all four, and hiring one of them commits you to very little. No minimum hours and no minimum duration means a two-week sprint and a two-year build are equally valid, developers can work as contractors or move in-house, and you pay for work delivered with nothing upfront. The IP stays yours, and requests typically come back matched inside a day.
A Lemon.io developer stays a contractor, though, and everything attached to that stays with you. The platform handles the contract and the monthly billing, but payroll, compliance, benefits, and equipment sit outside what it does.
Its bench is also stocked for engineering and data work specifically, so filling a design or operations seat means going somewhere else, and the platform's involvement thins out once a match is made.
Startups reach for Lemon.io when the role is engineering, you want a budget figure before you commit, and you'd like to see real profiles while you're still deciding. It's less suited to teams that want a long-term, embedded hire with payroll and compliance handled for them.
Lemon.io charges a single hourly rate per engagement, with no upfront fee and payment only for work delivered. The total cost depends on their tech stack, seniority, and what the project needs.
Turing is a remote hiring platform that sits inside a much larger AI business. Alongside placing engineers, it supplies frontier labs with datasets, evaluations, and reinforcement learning environments, and builds agentic systems for enterprises.
Three million engineers have applied to the platform, and about 1% end up listed. Most roles fill within four days, sometimes the same day, which means four open reqs can run at once instead of queuing behind each other. The bench also holds depth across 100-plus skills, so a search for a Go engineer, an ML engineer, and two React developers doesn't come back strong on one and thin on the others.
Datasets and agent deployment have become the center of the company, and the hiring product runs largely on automation as a result. Developers clear tests on programming languages, data structures, algorithms, system design, and their specialization, then sit a 57-question seniority assessment covering everything from project impact to communication. Better than five hours of testing sits behind each listing, and none of it involves a recruiter reading a resume.
That automation extends into the engagement. Daily standups are mandatory for every developer, every match includes a minimum of four hours of overlap with your working day, and a three-week trial costs nothing if the person doesn't hold up. What you don't get is anyone employing them. Payroll, compliance, and equipment are yours to arrange, and the model assumes a long-running full-time role, so a short project finds thin options.
Turing earns its place when a roadmap needs several engineers at the same time and your own team can't absorb the interviewing. You're buying filled seats and a working process, which suits a company that already has the structure to hold an engagement together once it starts.
There are no published figures to work from. Engineers set their own rates, with Turing recommending a number based on market conditions and the demand it sees, so what you pay depends on who you hire. There's no upfront cost to start a search, and every engagement opens with a risk-free three-week trial. Payment begins once that trial ends.
● G2: 4.3/5 — Based on 20 reviews
Gun.io runs a managed hiring process that doesn't end at the introduction. Before candidates come up, a senior engineer walks your stack, your constraints, and the parts of the build most likely to break, and what comes out of that becomes the standard the work gets measured against for the rest of the project.
Developers reach a shortlist through three filters, starting with an algorithmic screen and a review of work history and background, then a live technical interview with one of Gun.io's own senior engineers. Nobody who hasn't cleared all three is put in front of a client, which is part of why about 70% of the developers currently engaged have a decade or more behind them. Companies average 13 days from opening a request to making a hire.
Once the work starts, a reviewer stays on it, watching for code quality slipping or the architecture wandering from what was agreed. If the roadmap moves, the skill mix on the engagement moves with it, and work that comes in below the standard is Gun.io's problem to fix rather than a conversation about scope. Changing developers costs nothing and can happen whenever you decide it needs to.
The paperwork runs through the same relationship. Gun.io executes the contracts, tracks hours, invoices you, and pays developers weekly, handling payroll and tax compliance across 100-plus countries along with local IP and labor law. You can engage someone on contract, run contract-to-hire to see how they work out first, or place them directly onto your payroll.
All of that is a lot of process to buy for a two-week script, and the price reflects the seniority it's built around. Talent comes from the U.S., Latin America, Asia, and Europe, so working hours are something you ask for rather than something the map gives you, and the model is built around individual contractors instead of a team you can hand a whole workstream to.
Gun.io is worth the premium when the project can't afford a bad hire, like a payments rebuild or a launch with a fixed date, and you want a senior engineer watching the work as it lands rather than only picking who does it.
Gun.io bills by the hour for contract work, with the band set by seniority and scope. You pay nothing until you start working with someone.
● G2: 4.5/5 — Based on 16 reviews
Screening falls to you, though the platform hands you material to do it with. Identity and location are verified before anyone can connect, and profiles carry verified work history, client ratings, and a record of completed projects you can read against what someone claims in a proposal. Business Plus adds a filter that narrows the pool to Upwork's most rigorously screened freelancers, along with an AI recruiter that returns a curated shortlist in under six hours.
Where Upwork does the most work is around the money. Fixed-price contracts fund milestones into escrow, and nothing releases until you approve what came back. Hourly contracts run through a Work Diary that logs what was actually being worked on, so a week can be reviewed before it bills. If an engagement falls apart, Upwork mediates the dispute instead of leaving you chasing an invoice.
That protection covers the transaction and not the outcome. Anyone can post and anyone can bid, so proposals arrive unfiltered and sorting them is time you spend. Hiring at the bottom of the rate range tends to produce work someone else has to redo, and every freelancer here is running several clients at once, which makes this a poor place to look for someone who'll hold context on your product for two years.
Upwork works best on a job with a defined finish, like a landing page, a data cleanup, a contract review, or a month of design help. You trade screening time for the ability to find almost any skill without a sales call.
Upwork is free to join on either plan and charges only when you hire. A service fee sits on top of a small per-contract initiation charge, and both move with the plan you're on.
● G2: 4.5/5 — Based on 3,223 reviews
BairesDev's core business is building software for you rather than staffing you to build it yourself. Its most complete engagement covers the whole lifecycle, from planning and architecture through development, QA, and deployment. BairesDev's own project managers run the schedule, its engineers write the code, and you review against milestones instead of standups.
Because the vendor owns the outcome, it staffs whatever the outcome needs. QA engineers, UX designers, data scientists, product managers, and business analysts come out of the same 4,000-person bench as the developers, so a build that turns out to need a data pipeline and a design system doesn't send you looking for two more vendors.
Two lighter models sit underneath. A dedicated team gives you a pod on one workstream with BairesDev still coordinating it. Staff augmentation drops individual senior engineers into a team you already run, where you direct the work as you would any embedded hire. What separates the three is how much of the build stays yours.
All three are vendor engagements rather than hires. The engineer stays BairesDev's employee throughout, so pay, retention, and career path sit on its side of the line, and someone who turns out to be exactly right for your team stays on someone else's payroll.
Getting started also often takes weeks, since a discovery call and a scoping round come before you see a proposal, and the engagements are built for quarters rather than weeks.
BairesDev makes sense when you need software built and don't have the team to build it, like modernizing a legacy platform or launching a product line from nothing. What you're buying is a finished thing on a schedule, with the vendor accountable for delivering it.
BairesDev doesn't publish a rate card. The figure for your engagement arrives after a discovery call, priced by scope, team size, seniority, and which services are in the contract.
Deel handles everything that comes after you've decided who to hire. It becomes the legal employer, writes the contract, runs onboarding, processes payroll, administers benefits, and carries local compliance, so a full-time hire in another country doesn't mean opening an entity there. Employment runs through Deel's own entities in 130-plus countries, with hiring available in 150-plus and payments reaching 200-plus.
The right structure depends on the person. An EOR arrangement makes Deel the full legal employer abroad. Contractor management writes compliant contracts and pays in 120-plus currencies, with a Contractor of Record option that takes on the misclassification exposure rather than leaving it with you. A U.S. PEO covers co-employment across all fifty states. You choose per hire, and the payroll and compliance underneath adjust to match.
Equipment and immigration run through the same platform. Laptops arrive preconfigured with app access already provisioned across 130-plus countries, so a first day isn't spent waiting on hardware, and visa support covers 70-plus countries for anyone who needs to relocate.
Deel has moved into sourcing as well. Deel Talent returns up to 20 AI-vetted candidates from a pool of 1.5 million in-market professionals, and specialist recruiting partners take the harder roles, with a 90-day guarantee on anyone hired that way. What that isn't is a screened engineering bench built around one region, so vetting depth, working-hours fit, and keeping someone once they start all stay your work.
Deel earns its place when you already know how to find people and the difficulty is employing them legally across several countries at once. For a company hiring one engineer in one country, it's built for a bigger problem than the one you have.
Deel publishes per-worker, per-month pricing on month-to-month terms with no long-term contract, and the EOR and PEO figures are platform fees that sit on top of the worker's actual salary, taxes, and mandatory benefits.
Toptal is a good fit when you need a senior specialist on a defined piece of work and you need them soon. It provides vetted candidates in days, the trial protects you if the first match misses, and a project with a deadline gets what it came for. But none of that helps with a role that has no finish line.
When the work becomes permanent, your priorities change. Speed still matters, but now you also start asking whether the person will still be there in two years, and who carries the employment risk while they are.
If those are the questions you're sitting with, Strider is built to answer them. Four or five vetted names come back within two days, each with the subject-matter expert's write-up attached, and most teams close a first hire inside two weeks. Sourcing across nine Latin American countries keeps that person working your hours rather than catching up the next morning.
They also stay. Full-time hires work with one company rather than rotating between accounts, and retention past 90% means the engineer who spent month one learning your architecture is usually the one still applying it in year three. That's the part a project-based model can't reproduce, however good the individual is.
Strider is the legal employer throughout, so contracts, payroll, local taxes, benefits, and compliance sit on its side, along with the exposure that comes with getting any of them wrong. No entity to open, and no second vendor behind a hire you just made.
Book a call with Strider to find your next long-term LATAM hire.