Locations · Seattle, WA
Senior European engineering teams for Seattle startups and enterprises building cloud-native systems on AWS. We embed alongside your team in Bellevue, South Lake Union, or Redmond — ex-AWS, ex-Microsoft, ex-Snowflake patterns, 8+ years average tenure, Pacific Time overlap every working day. Dedicated teams from 12,000 EUR/month, fixed-scope MVPs from 25,000 EUR. We contract through our German entity (YuSMP GmbH), invoice in USD or EUR, sign Delaware-law MSAs, and never sub-vendor offshore.
Seattle remains the densest concentration of cloud-native engineering talent in the world — Amazon HQ1 in South Lake Union employs roughly 55,000 corporate staff after the 2024-2025 RTO consolidation, AWS leadership runs out of Re:Invent-adjacent campuses in Bellevue and SLU, Microsoft's Redmond campus is mid-build on its $5B expansion, and Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, and HashiCorp all anchor their second offices in Bellevue. The flip side: senior engineering comp in 2026 has snapped back up after the 2023–2024 cooling. Amazon L6 base + RSU + sign-on packages reach $510k+, Microsoft 65 packages clear $480k, and Snowflake staff offers in Bellevue routinely cross $600k all-in. A funded Series A startup competing for staff engineers in Seattle now spends $260–$330k base alone before equity, on top of recruiter fees of 25–33 percent first-year. Cloud-native work specifically — EKS, Kafka/MSK, Snowflake, dbt, Iceberg, Terraform — carries a 15–25 percent premium on top of that because every FAANG-adjacent shop wants the same profile.
For founders building on AWS, Seattle is also where vendor sales motion happens fastest: AWS account teams will fly across Lake Washington for a $200k MRR account, and design-partner programs from Snowflake, Databricks, and MongoDB are easier to land. The trade-off is build cost. A 6-person platform team in Seattle running 18 months — staff + senior + senior + senior + mid + PM — is $4.2M to $5.6M fully loaded. The same team out of Berlin, Warsaw, or Tbilisi, billed through our German entity, runs $1.4M to $1.9M. Same seniority, same AWS certifications, same English calibration. The four-hour daily Pacific Time overlap and a single accountable EU entity is what makes the math work without losing engineering velocity.
Seattle senior cloud engineer fully loaded: $180–$300/hr (base + RSU vest + benefits load + recruiter amortization). Our EU senior cloud engineer billable: 65–95 EUR/hr (~$70–$103). For a 5-engineer team over 12 months you spend $620k instead of $1.8M, with no equity dilution and no 4–6 month time-to-hire.
Our cloud team holds 14 active AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, Security Specialty, ML Specialty, Database Specialty). They have shipped EKS migrations, Aurora cutovers, and Step Functions orchestrations in production — you do not need to compete with Amazon RSU refreshers to keep them.
Standups at 9:00 PT, demos at 10:30 PT, architecture reviews at 13:00 PT — all within our shifted 11:00–20:00 CET shift. You get a real daily overlap window, not an email-and-pray async loop, and on-call rotations can extend to 02:00 CET (17:00 PT) when needed.
EKS on Graviton, Aurora PostgreSQL, S3 + Iceberg lakes, EventBridge, Step Functions, MSK. Terraform IaC, GitHub Actions CI, observability on Datadog or CloudWatch + OTel.
6–12 month migrations from Java/.NET monoliths to AWS-native microservices, with strangler-fig cutovers, dual-write phases, and read-after-write parity testing before traffic shift.
RAG pipelines on Bedrock + OpenSearch + Pinecone, LLM fine-tuning on SageMaker, feature stores on Snowflake + Feast, and agent orchestration with Bedrock Agents and LangGraph.
SOC 2 Type II implementation, FedRAMP Moderate readiness for GovTech-adjacent Seattle startups selling into federal pilots, and AWS Control Tower + GuardDuty hardening.
Lakehouse builds on Snowflake or Databricks, dbt models, Airflow/Dagster orchestration, reverse-ETL on Hightouch/Census, and product analytics on Amplitude or Mixpanel.
Drop-in senior engineers inside your sprint, or a self-managed pod with tech lead, engineers, and QA. Either model, your roadmap, your standups, our team accountability.
35-engineer platform team can't hire fast enough to ship the multi-region failover and the EU tenant residency project the board promised investors. We embed a 6-person EU pod focused on EU residency — Frankfurt + Stockholm regions, EKS multi-cluster, Aurora Global Database — while the local team keeps shipping North America roadmap. Eight-month delivery, $1.1M saved vs local hire.
Ex-Microsoft Principal raised a $4M seed, has two co-founders and no engineering team. They need an MVP in 14 weeks for a design-partner pilot with two F500 retailers. We deliver a fixed-scope MVP at 42,000 EUR — React frontend, Python backend, Bedrock RAG, AWS Cognito, Stripe Billing — with one of our staff engineers continuing as embedded tech lead post-launch.
120-person company, on-prem .NET monolith, HIPAA-regulated workloads. Board wants a 24-month migration to AWS GovCloud-adjacent Healthcare Lake architecture. We staff a 4-person migration squad alongside their internal team, deliver the migration plan in week 4, and execute strangler-fig migration of 27 services over 18 months.
CET (Berlin) is 9 hours ahead of PT (Seattle) in winter, 9 hours ahead during DST overlap, and 9 hours ahead in summer once both sides shift. Our default shift for Seattle accounts is 11:00–20:00 CET, which gives you 11:00 CET = 02:00 PT (early Seattle morning, ignore) through 20:00 CET = 11:00 PT (late Seattle morning). Practical overlap: every working day from your 8:00 AM coffee through your 12:00 PM lunch. That is enough for daily standup, mid-morning demo, midday architecture review, and async hand-off into your afternoon. For incident-grade work we extend lead-engineer availability to 23:00 CET (14:00 PT).
Seattle clients contract with YuSMP GmbH, our German operating entity registered in Berlin, with DE VAT, GDPR DPA template ready, and US-side bank rails for USD invoicing. Master Services Agreement is governed by either Delaware law (default for US clients) or German law (default for EU clients with US ops) — we have signed both more than 50 times. Standard package: mutual NDA, IP assignment to client on payment, work-for-hire clause, optional source-code escrow with Iron Mountain or NCC Group, DPA covering GDPR Art. 28 and CCPA processor obligations, and a SOC 2 Type II attestation (in progress, available H2 2026). No reseller chain, no Indian sub-vendors, no surprise affiliates — the team you meet at sales is the team that ships.
From 12,000 EUR/month. 2-person pod (1 tech lead at 50%, 1 senior engineer at 100%). Drop-in inside your sprint, your Jira, your standups. Three-month minimum.
From 28,000 EUR/month. 4–6 person team: tech lead, 3–4 engineers, QA, optional product analyst. Self-managed delivery against your roadmap, weekly demos to your PM.
From 25,000 EUR. 6–10 week MVP build with a written scope, fixed price, and a hand-off to either your team or our dedicated team retainer.
Net 15 first invoice, net 30 after. USD or EUR billing, your choice. No setup fee, no recruiter fee, no equity asks.
45-minute call: roadmap, stack, constraints, timeline, must-have AWS services. We respond with a written team proposal in 3 business days.
Mutual NDA in 24 hours, MSA + DPA in 5–7 days. Delaware-law default for Seattle, USD or EUR invoicing, IP assignment standard.
Named engineers on-boarded into your Slack, Jira, GitHub within 5 business days of signed MSA. First demo in week 2.
Daily standup 9:00 PT, weekly demo, bi-weekly architecture review, monthly written report to your CTO and board.
Seattle senior engineer fully loaded cost in 2026 sits between $180 and $300 per hour (Amazon L6, Microsoft 64, Snowflake staff comp packages have pushed market rates up again after the 2024 cooling). Our EU senior engineers bill at 65 to 95 EUR per hour (roughly $70 to $103 at current EUR/USD), with no recruiting fees, no equity dilution, no laptop spend, no benefits load. For a five-person team running 12 months, that is the difference between a $1.8M and a $620k all-in number. The engineers are equivalent seniority: 8+ years, ex-AWS, ex-Microsoft, ex-Snowflake patterns are common in our talent pool from Berlin and Warsaw.
Yes. Our default CET workday is 9:00 to 18:00 Central European, which gives Seattle a guaranteed daily overlap from 9:00 to 11:00 PT in winter (10:00 to 12:00 PT in summer when CET shifts to CEST). For Pacific Time clients we run a shifted shift — lead engineers and product on 11:00 to 20:00 CET, which gives Seattle 11:00 PT to 3:00 PT every day. Standups, demos, and architecture reviews all sit inside that window.
We contract through YuSMP GmbH, our German entity (Berlin-registered, DE VAT, full GDPR compliance posture). Seattle clients receive a USD or EUR invoice (your choice) on a master services agreement governed by either Delaware or German law — we have signed both. IP assignment, source-code escrow, mutual NDA, and a DPA aligned to GDPR + CCPA are standard before kickoff. No reseller chain, no Indian sub-vendors, no surprise affiliates.
That is roughly 40 percent of our Seattle pipeline. Typical engagement: 6 to 12 month migration from on-prem Java monolith or legacy .NET to AWS-native (EKS, RDS/Aurora, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge), with Terraform IaC, CI/CD on GitHub Actions or CodePipeline, observability on Datadog or CloudWatch + OpenTelemetry. We have AWS certified solutions architects (professional and specialty) on staff and a working relationship with AWS Seattle SA teams for shared accounts.
Dedicated teams start at 12,000 EUR per month for a focused 2-person pod (1 senior engineer + 1 tech lead at part-time), typical 4–6 person teams run 28,000 to 45,000 EUR per month all-in. Fixed-scope MVP work starts at 25,000 EUR for a 6–10 week build. We bill monthly in arrears, net 15 for first invoice, net 30 after. Three-month minimum on dedicated teams, month-to-month thereafter with 30 days notice.
