How to Hire Engineers in a New City

Opening an engineering team in a second city is usually framed as a hiring problem: pick a place, post the roles, fill the seats. It is really an organisational decision that happens to involve hiring, and the companies that struggle almost always got the organisational part wrong before the first interview. I work with founders going through this regularly, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth writing down.

Be honest about why you are doing it

There are three good reasons to open in a new city: you need a talent pool you cannot reach from where you are, you have a commercial reason to be present in that market, or someone you badly want to hire lives there and will not move. The bad one is cost.

Cost is the reason most often given and the one that holds up worst. Published 2026 comparisons put regional UK salaries at roughly 10 to 30 per cent below London depending on the city and the role, with Edinburgh, Bristol and Cambridge nearer the narrow end. That gap is closing too, because remote and hybrid roles at London-headquartered companies increasingly pay at or close to London rates wherever the engineer sits. A saving that assumed 30 per cent and delivers 12, while adding a second set of overheads and a permanent coordination tax, is not a saving. If the salary line is the only case for the location, the honest alternative is to hire remotely into your existing structure.

Choosing the city on evidence, not vibes

Once you have a real reason, the choice comes down to depth in the specific talent pool you need, not general “tech city” reputation. The UK’s strongest clusters outside London are Manchester, Bristol, Leeds, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and they are specialised rather than interchangeable: Edinburgh in data science and AI research with close university links, Bristol in robotics, semiconductor design and embedded work, Manchester in broad AI and data demand.

The question is narrow: how many people in this city have done the specific thing you need, and how many are realistically hireable in the next year? A city with two hundred relevant engineers and four employers competing for them beats one with two thousand and forty. Research that number before you sign a lease, not after.

The same logic applies internationally. Our work across Berlin, Amsterdam and New York says depth in a specific speciality matters far more than the size of the overall market, and the salary picture varies sharply between them.

The anchor hire decides everything

The single highest-leverage decision is who you hire first. Early hires in a new location set the standards, the working norms and the hiring bar for everyone who follows, and they do it with far less oversight than a first hire in your main office would get.

That argues for seniority, and for over-investing in the assessment. You want someone who operates without supervision, holds the technical bar when nobody is watching, and who other engineers will join specifically to work with. Waiting an extra two months for that person is almost always cheaper than filling the role quickly with someone competent who cannot anchor a site. This is also the hire where a structured, genuinely technical screen matters most, because you have the least local context to fall back on. If you are hiring a first engineering leader rather than a first engineer, the judgement you are testing for is different again.

Critical mass, and what happens below it

A new site needs to be a team, not a collection of individuals who share a postcode. The practical threshold is where the group can hold its own design discussion and cover its own on-call, which for most companies is around six to eight people. Below that line you have remote workers with a commute: the isolation of being outside the main office without the benefit of a local team, and they tend to leave. Plan the ramp to critical mass before you hire the first person. If you cannot fund it, hire remotely and revisit later.

The failure is structural, not cultural

Most second offices that fail do so for reasons unconnected to the local market. Decisions get made in the original office and the new site finds out afterwards, so it executes work it had no part in shaping. The best people there notice within a quarter, and the resulting attrition gets blamed on “it being hard to hire in that city”.

That asymmetry is built into the arrangement rather than being an accident of communication. The companies that avoid it move real ownership to the new location early: a whole product area, a service with its own roadmap, something the team is accountable for end to end. They also make decisions legible in writing rather than in the corridor of the founding office. That is the part founders underestimate: opening a second location changes how the first one has to work.

Where we fit

We run searches across four cities and see which of these decisions hold up. If you are weighing a second location, we can tell you honestly how deep the pool is for the roles you actually need before you commit, and we screen every candidate ourselves so a remote-anchored search does not become a CV-forwarding exercise. See how we work as a tech recruitment agency in London, explore our services, or talk to us about where you are thinking of opening.