Remote tech jobs in Canada

Jai Shri Ram MovNorth community.

I’m a software engineer in NYC at one of the FANG firms, my wife is a devops engineer in NJ. I’ve been in America for the last 5 years and they’ve been amazing but with no clear path to citizenship we’ve decided to move on. We’ve been thinking of immigrating to Canada for a while and a couple of years back started our PR application which culminated in Feb this year with us completing a soft landing. Life’s been moving at breakneck pace and a couple of months back we were blessed with our first child. With the arrival of the little one, having stability and permanence are now of paramount importance.

We don’t want to move to Toronto or Vancouver, to me it doesn’t make sense of moving from the grind of life in NYC to a smaller city with the same issues namely expensive housing, overcrowding and traffic. I’m not a huge fan of the winter on the east coast and if at all possible I’d like to not endure cold winters (I know about the clothing and have a good Canadian Goose jacket which keeps me toasty in the winter, but I still don’t enjoy winter). I had my mind made up to move to Calgary, we did our landing and US Visa processing there. I quite liked the city but the visit was in Feb and the weather there was between -15 and -35 the entire week we were there and the wife has vetoed Calgary. After more research we’ve agreed upon moving to Victoria if I can find a job there.

Apologies for that somewhat long and winded introduction/background context but moving onto point, there aren’t too many tech companies in Victoria, I’m researching the good ones there and will start applying to them in the upcoming week after sprucing up my resume. However given the limited pool of companies, I’m wondering if there are good tech companies that have a predominantly remote workforce or those with a presence in Canada and allow for remote work.

I’d greatly appreciate if someone has done some research or has personal experience working remotely after moving to Canada. I’d also like to assure you that I’m somewhat realistic, which may be hard to believe with my list of not wanting to experience bitter winters and moving to Victoria. I don’t have illusions of making 250K+ USD, I think we’d do well with 120-150K CAD. We have reasonable savings to put towards a home or to put 60-70% down and do a 5-10 year mortgage if that’s beneficial from a tax purpose.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Double congratulations :+1: :slight_smile:

Have you considered remote jobs with US companies?

Often, remote jobs with US employers are available for those located in Canada (even if they mention US only, because they are thinking in terms of timezones) either as an employee of their Canadian entity, contractor (you have your own corporation or a LLC equivalent) or you’ll be hired through a PAO (something like you get all benefits of an employer through a 3rd party, who is the intermediary between you and the employer).

Are you aware of what kind of salaries are possible with remote work in Canada as an employee or a contractor? (I’m researching this but it’s been hard to get that number).

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Thank you buddy.

I’ve been thinking about that, didn’t do anything concrete yet. I will check with US companies, the issue finding a company here is that the smaller companies don’t wan’t to touch visas/sponsorship and it’s hard to explain Canadian PR to them.

As for the bigger companies, I’ll check to see if they’re willing to interview with me here and have me work remotely with them later.

As for the salaries, I’ve been checking reddit and glassdoor. Exact numbers are hard to nail down, some of my friends who work in my company (not remotely) in Toronto at the same level as me make about 200K CAD.

I’ll share more details as I move along with the process later in the year.

Have you considered starting out in either Vancouver or Toronto and working your way to Victoria? You may have realized Victoria isn’t a major tech hub and opportunities may be limited.

If you want to stay away from the snow / cold, your options may be limited to west of Edmonton / Calgary. Even Vancouver had a couple weeks of snow back in Feb / March.

Perhaps, the weather shouldn’t be a deciding factor for you

While I was looking for jobs in Canada (while still in the US), I told recruiters on LinkedIn who had reached out to me (regarding US jobs) about my plan to move to Canada (which was with in a couple months back then) and a majority of them came back with a Canadian job or option to work remotely. You could probably ask recruiters in the US and they might be able to get you leads on remote jobs. Two companies that come into mind are Slack and Confluent; I am sure there are many more.

wow @panditji , 200K CAD is good (I’m assuming that’s like some 8-10 years experience?) for Toronto I think. I thought it tops out at 130-150K for devs at any seniority level.

Good to know that higher salaries do exist for experienced engineers.

Best option for you would be to convince your current US employer to let you work remotely. It works best for both parties as they won’t have problems offering you great pay. I am doing the same. And mine is a mid-stage startup based in California so its a really small company. In fact, smaller companies are open to this once they know how it will work and will let you research how it could work. They make use of third parties to take care of Canadian payroll. I was a bit fortunate since we had 2 sales guys based in Toronto (but we dont have an office in Canada) so the process was already in place for remote work.

Hello All, which website can we use to look after Finance jobs remotely?

That’s a good call out. I’ll bring this up with my manager in our 1 on 1, but I’m not too optimistic about this because the current org doesn’t have a footprint in Canada. If it was a temporary arrangement for a couple of months, that would be fine (People work from India for a few weeks along with their vacation all the time).

As a single remote employee for a team that is co-located, things become harder as you don’t have all the context which is why my preference for an employer that has a remote working culture.

I’ve now started replying to recruiters and am asking them about remote work. Haven’t heard back from someone yet, but it’s only been a week. I will pursue this strategy further.

Like I said, I don’t particularly mind the harsh winters at all. My wife is a different story however.
My thought process is this - The wife and I have enough in savings to comfortably pay for (or atleast pay for 60-80% of) a house. Once that is taken care of, even if I’m bringing in 100-150K CAD annually that’s more than adequate for a good middle class life. If she decides to go back to work in a couple of years that’s great, if not that’s fine. Once we have our Canadian Citizenship we can always move back to the US under the TN program and in case of an economic slowdown we’d always have the option to go back to Canada or India as the case may be.

I preferably want to avoid Toronto and Vancouver because of the extremely high cost of home ownership. Both of us aren’t extremely outgoing or party type of people, suburban life suits us just fine. So 20-40K more dollars in these places wont go nearly as far as we’d like in terms of settling down.

But yes, if a remote option doesn’t materialize then I’m open minded about moving to one of these cities. We will then put the aspirations of home ownership to a side and focus on building equity elsewhere as we progress down the path of citizenship.

I think that’s what terminal.io does for companies. They help them set up remote structure / payroll without all the hassle.

You should look into them

Terminal.io looks interesting.

US companies having remote employees outside US usually do it with a Global PEO (professional employer org) so you get benefits (like vacation, health etc).

I think terminal.io is doing that along with providing a workspace.

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Thanks for sharing, terminal.io seems promising. Really helpful to connect with companies that are already open to hire in Canada.

Please do share any other similar resources.

@ntn Thanks for sharing this buddy Terminal worked out for me. It was way better than dealing with other recruiters who’re not particularly in tune with the Canadian market.

For anyone else who wanders over here with a similar question, I’d strongly recommend you connecting with them. Please DM me if you have any questions.

Once the offer is negotiated and move done, I will share more details in these forums.

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Any luck on the job search using terminal.io ?

Given the current COVID situation, I won’t be surprised if a lot of software companies let their employees work remotely for extended periods of time, with occasional onsite visits if needed. If I were you I’d take up a job in any major city that I find and I like. Once I spend a year or so in Canada I’d have time and a better chance of finding another job that is full time remote and let’s you move to a cheaper quieter place. Of course if you can do the latter sooner that is better. Maybe once the economy rebounds there will be more options.

Hello @panditji

Can you please guide me on Terminal.io

If you’ve posted the experience elsewhere then please share the link.

Jai Shri Ram @anandm
Terminal is basically a PEO firm which handles payroll and HR for employees. They also help out with recruiting. As an employee you work directly with the US company. You should have work authorization in Canada, Terminal may also be able to help with this after the interviews.
They also have a few offices in Canada, so they provide office space too, like WeWork.

If there’s an opening that you like here, shoot me a DM. I can put in a referral for you. The actual interview process is dependent on the US company, so that will vary slightly.

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No relevant openings as of now. But I will definitely reach out for a referral if something comes up. Thank you so much for the prompt response!