Hiring across London and New York or San Francisco works best when you design the team before opening the searches. Decide what each person owns, when they need to work together and how they will be employed. Two location labels on the same job description are not an operating plan.
The reason for adding a city matters. You might need access to a particular specialism, closer contact with customers or a second group that can own a product area. Those are different briefs and they create different dependencies between the hires.
Start with a shared engineering hiring plan, then adapt the location, package and employment details. Corellia Talent’s approach below is a practical framework for making those decisions visible.
Give the second city a clear purpose
Write down the outcome that becomes easier with a second location. If the answer is simply a cheaper salary, calculate the full arrangement first: employment costs, management time, travel, equipment and the work required to coordinate decisions.
Describe the ownership of each role without referring to geography. Then ask whether the split still makes sense when people are not online together. A London engineer who must wait for every product decision from San Francisco has responsibility without enough authority.
You can organise around independent product areas, shared services with clear interfaces or a genuinely integrated team with agreed overlap. Avoid creating an informal headquarters where one group makes the decisions and another only receives tasks.
Tell candidates why their location is important. A concrete explanation of customers, collaboration or specialist work is more useful than presenting every city as interchangeable.
Put actual working hours on the plan
London is normally five hours ahead of New York and eight ahead of SF, but the UK and US change their clocks on different dates. Check the actual calendar when setting recurring meetings, interview slots and travel. Official UK and US clock-change guidance explains the differing schedules. [Sources 1 and 2]
Write the required overlap in each person’s local time. A hypothetical London and New York team might reserve part of the London afternoon for shared decisions. A London and SF team has less conventional-day overlap, so it needs more independent decisions and written handovers.
Test the plan against ordinary life rather than an exceptional week. Who is consistently working early or late? What happens when that person is on leave? Can the team operate without relying on the founder’s willingness to answer messages at any hour?
Rotate occasional inconvenient meetings where appropriate, but do not treat rotation as a substitute for a sustainable daily arrangement. Put the expectation in the hiring brief so candidates can assess it early.
Decide the employment route before making an offer
Confirm which legal entity will employ each person, where they will work and who owns payroll, benefits, insurance and required checks. The arrangement should be ready before the candidate receives a final contract.
One route is employment through your own appropriately established entity. Another is an employer-of-record arrangement, where a third party is the contractual employer and your team directs the day-to-day work. These are operating choices that need jurisdiction-specific review, not interchangeable labels. [Source 6]
For UK hires, the government’s employer checklist covers matters such as employment status, employer costs, workplace responsibilities and registration. HMRC guidance also shows why the position of an overseas employer cannot be reduced to a single rule about having a person in the country. [Sources 3 and 4]
In the US, using a third party for payroll does not automatically remove the employer’s federal tax responsibilities. The IRS distinguishes different third-party arrangements and their liabilities. An employer-of-record proposal should therefore explain the actual legal and payroll structure, rather than relying on a marketing description. [Source 5]
Assign an internal owner to coordinate employment, tax and immigration specialists. Candidates should have one clear point of contact, even when several advisers support the setup.
Build local packages from the same role framework
Use the same level definitions and scope criteria in both cities, then establish the relevant local package. Do not convert a London salary into dollars and call it a New York or SF benchmark.
Compare base salary, bonus terms, equity, leave, pension or retirement benefits, healthcare arrangements and any travel requirement. Some elements have a cash value; others change the practical experience of the job. Explain the package as a whole without treating every benefit as guaranteed take-home pay.
The three-city compensation guide and salary guide help structure that discussion. Keep observed advert data separate from modelled estimates, and date the evidence used for your bands.
Write how you place someone within a band and who can approve exceptions. Otherwise two simultaneous searches can drift into inconsistent offers because different managers negotiate differently.
Keep one assessment standard with local logistics
Candidates for equivalent roles should be assessed against the same responsibilities and evidence criteria. They do not need identical interview calendars if local availability makes that impractical.
Agree the core stages, who owns each decision and the evidence interviewers must record. Offer reasonable local-time slots and avoid repeatedly asking one city’s candidates to interview outside their working day.
Where the roles have different ownership, show that difference in the assessment. A customer-facing engineer in New York may need a different work sample from a platform engineer in London, even if the titles share a level.
Use one candidate record and a shared decision log. Duplicate outreach, conflicting role descriptions and delayed feedback are operational problems you can prevent before the searches begin.
Make written work part of the operating system
A distributed team needs decisions to remain understandable after a meeting ends. Choose a simple place for design proposals, decisions, outstanding questions and handovers.
A useful handover states the current situation, what changed, what is blocked, the next decision and its owner. It should let the receiving person act without reconstructing a conversation from chat messages.
Set expectations for response times and urgency. A routine question can wait for the next working period; a production incident needs a defined escalation route. Do not turn every chat notification into an implied request for immediate work.
Give new joiners examples of good written decisions. The hiring process can also explore how candidates explain trade-offs, but the company must provide a usable environment after they arrive.
Plan onboarding across both locations
The first weeks should connect each new engineer with the people, systems and customer context they need. Avoid scheduling all useful sessions around the original office and sending recordings as the only alternative.
Name a local or accessible support person, prepare equipment and access in advance, and identify a first piece of work with a clear owner. Pairing time matters most when the relevant people are actually available.
If travel is part of the plan, describe its purpose, expected frequency and who covers the cost. Do not leave candidates to discover that “remote” includes recurring long-distance travel after they accept.
Review the arrangement with both hires after they have used it. Ask where a decision waited unnecessarily, where context was missing and which meeting could have been a written update.
Launch one plan, not two disconnected searches
A short readiness review should answer five questions: why these cities, who owns what, when the team overlaps, how each person is employed and what package each location supports.
Give the searches a common owner and a shared view of progress. Compare the relevance of candidates and the reasons for withdrawal, rather than using raw application volume to declare one city better.
Keep the founding engineer mandate consistent as the search develops. If the first hire changes the needs of the second, update the brief deliberately and tell the people already in process. Two-city hiring becomes manageable when the operating decisions are explicit before the offer stage.
If you are planning a technical hire, Start a conversation.
Legal and tax points are summaries; take professional advice.
Sources
- UK clock changes, GOV.UK, checked 31 October 2026.
- US daylight saving time rules, NIST, checked 31 October 2026.
- Get ready to employ someone, GOV.UK, checked 31 October 2026.
- International employments and an employer’s UK presence, HMRC manual, checked 31 October 2026.
- Employer’s Tax Guide, third-party payer arrangements, IRS Publication 15 for 2026, checked 31 October 2026.
- Employer-of-record definition, ADP’s original service glossary, checked 31 October 2026. Used for the operating-model definition.
The operating model, interview planning and readiness review are Corellia Talent’s recommendations. Working-hour examples are hypothetical.