Ex-Disney · Ex-Globant · Freelance since 2014
Nearshore software development, without the agency in between.
I'm a senior engineer in Rosario, Argentina, working with US teams in the same business day. Twelve years shipping production software, including Disney and Globant. You get the engineer, not a sales call followed by whoever is on the bench.
Talk about your projectSame working day, not a handoff
Rosario is UTC-3. That is one hour ahead of New York and two ahead of Chicago, year round. Standups happen live, a question at 10am gets answered at 10am, and nothing waits for a timezone to wake up.
You talk to the person writing the code
No account manager, no delivery lead, no engineer swapped out after week three. The person on the discovery call is the person who commits. That is the actual difference between a freelancer and a 200-person nearshore vendor.
I have been on the other side of this
I worked at Globant, the largest nearshore vendor in Latin America, and at The Walt Disney Company. I know how these engagements are scoped, staffed and billed, including the parts that are designed to be billed.
Contracting that your finance team already understands
Independent contractor, W-8BEN on file, invoices in USD, wire or Deel. Standard MSA and SOW, NDA and IP assignment signed before the first commit. No entity to set up, no EOR fee.
What I build with on US engagements
- TypeScriptShared types across web, mobile and backend
- NestJSProduction APIs with modular architecture and real test coverage
- Next.jsApp Router, Server Components, SEO-first marketing and dashboards
- React NativeOne mobile codebase for App Store and Google Play
- PostgreSQLTransactional, boring, the right default for most products
- DockerReproducible environments so "works on my machine" never comes up
- GitHub ActionsCI that runs tests and blocks the merge, not decoration
- AWSECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront when the client is already there
- Claude APILLM features with prompt caching and cost controls from day one
- TerraformInfrastructure you can read in a diff and hand to someone else
- JestUnit and integration coverage that survives a refactor
- PlaywrightEnd-to-end runs against a real browser before release
When one nearshore engineer beats a nearshore team
Nearshore usually gets sold as a team: a pod of five, a delivery lead, a QA, a project manager, a minimum of six months. That shape exists because it is how a vendor with four hundred engineers on payroll stays profitable, not because your project needs six people.
A lot of work does not. Shipping an MVP, rescuing a codebase the last contractor abandoned, adding a payments integration, taking an API from prototype to something that survives production traffic, adding LLM features without setting fire to the budget: these are one-senior-engineer jobs. Adding four more people makes them slower, because coordination cost is real and it is paid in your calendar.
Where a team genuinely wins is scale and continuity: parallel workstreams, 24/7 on-call, someone covering when a person quits, compliance that requires named roles. If that is your situation, hire the vendor. I will tell you so on the call rather than take the engagement and staff it thin.
The reason nearshore works at all is the overlap. Offshore to Eastern Europe or South Asia means your afternoon is their night, so every clarification costs a day. From Argentina the business day is the same business day: I am one hour ahead of New York, two ahead of Chicago, three ahead of Denver and four ahead of San Francisco, and Argentina does not observe daylight saving, so the gap only narrows in your summer.
What you actually get: direct Slack access, commits you can read daily, a demo whenever there is something worth demoing, and estimates that account for the boring parts. What you do not get: a bench, a bench rate, or a junior learning on your budget.
FAQs
Hiring engineers in a nearby country with overlapping business hours, instead of offshore locations eight to twelve hours away. For a US company, nearshore means Latin America. The point is the overlap: you can ask a question and get an answer the same afternoon rather than the next morning.
Rosario is UTC-3, one hour ahead of New York and two ahead of Chicago. Argentina does not observe daylight saving, so from March to November the gap shrinks by an hour. In practice: a full overlap with the East Coast, most of the day with Central and Mountain, and mornings with the West Coast.
Yes, and I would rather be direct about why: the cost of living in Argentina is lower, so a rate that is well below a US senior is a good rate here. That is the entire arbitrage. It is not cheaper because the work is junior, and I do not quote below what lets me do the job properly.
As an independent contractor. I sign your MSA, SOW, NDA and IP assignment, and provide a W-8BEN so you have no US withholding obligation. Invoices go out in USD and you can pay by wire, Wise, Deel or your existing AP process. No local entity and no employer of record needed.
That is most of the work. I join your repo, your board and your Slack, follow your review process and your conventions. Staff augmentation only fails when the outside engineer works in a parallel universe and hands over a surprise, so I default to small PRs and visible progress.
Good, that is the healthy outcome. The code lives in your organization from the first commit, the infrastructure is in your accounts, and I write the handover document before it is urgent. There is no dependency on me by design, and nothing to unwind.
Need a senior engineer in your timezone?
Tell me what you are building and what is blocking it. If a team would serve you better than one engineer, I will say that instead of selling you the engagement.
Let's talk