By Carlos A. Delcid

How SaaS teams can keep shipping without gambling on visas

Why this matters if you’re a SaaS CEO, COO, or CTO

• The new H‑1B rules make it more expensive and less predictable to bring senior engineers from abroad into the U.S.

• Your roadmap hasn’t slowed down, but your access to global engineering talent through visas has.

• “We’ll just hire a dev off a platform if we get stuck” is not a real strategy; it’s a reaction.

• A well‑designed nearshore engineering system in LATAM lets you hit milestones, protect runway, and de‑risk hiring, instead of hoping the H‑1B lottery goes your way.

If any of that sounds like your current reality, this article is for you.

If you’re building a U.S. SaaS company between Seed and Series B, you’re in a very specific pressure zone:

• You have real customers and real product‑market fit.

• Your roadmap is full, and your board wants progress, not promises.

• You need senior engineers, but every U.S. hire hits your burn hard.

For a long time, the unspoken plan was:
“Hire locally where we can, and use H‑1B to bring in exceptional international talent.”

You built a system around it:

• An immigration attorney you trust

• A known process and annual calendar

• A rough model of how many registrations you need to get one approval

As of 2026, that system looks very different.

What actually changed with H‑1B

Two big shifts matter for you as a Seed–Series B SaaS:

1. The $100,000 fee for many new petitions from outside the U.S.

• If you want to bring in a worker currently abroad on a new H‑1B, you’re looking at a six‑figure fee before you even talk salary and benefits.

• For a startup with 11–200 people, that’s not just an extra line item. It’s a serious decision about runway and risk.

2. The wage‑based lottery that favors the highest‑paid roles

• Instead of a purely random draw, higher wage levels get more “entries” in the lottery.

• In practice, that tilts the odds toward large, well‑funded companies willing to pay top‑of‑market U.S. salaries.

  
  

H‑1B didn’t vanish.

But if you’re not a FAANG‑sized company, it just got:

• More expensive

• Less predictable

• Less accessible for engineers currently outside the U.S.

The result:

You still need to ship. You still need senior engineering talent. But the old “we’ll solve this with H‑1B” lever is no longer something you can depend on.

So the real question is:

How do you keep building with global talent if H‑1B isn’t your main path anymore?

You have a system for H‑1B. Do you have one for nearshore?

Most SaaS founders I talk to have a clean system for H‑1B:

• Legal partner

• Templates

• Internal owners

• A predictable annual rhythm

When we talk about nearshore engineering in LATAM, I usually hear one of three things:

• “We’ve never seriously considered it. Our mental model is still ‘engineers need to be here.’”

• “Isn’t that just outsourcing?”

• “If we ever get stuck, we’ll probably just grab a dev from Upwork to help.”

In other words, you have a mature, repeatable process for visas…
and almost no process for tapping into nearshore engineering.

If policy changes are pushing you to look at talent outside the U.S. again, nearshore can absolutely be a smart solution for engineering.

But it has to be treated with the same seriousness you gave your H‑1B system.

Just like you work with an immigration law firm to run a predictable H‑1B process, you can work with a strategy‑first partner to build a predictable nearshore engineering engine.

That’s where Puzzle comes in.

Common assumptions about nearshore (and what actually works)

Before we talk about the “how,” it’s worth naming a few assumptions I hear a lot:

• “Nearshore is just cheaper bodies.”

• “Quality will be lower than U.S. engineers.”

• “Communication will be a nightmare.”

• “Security and compliance will be messy.”

• “We’ll lose too much time managing people in another country.”

All of those can be true… if you approach nearshore like a random one‑off experiment.

What we see work, consistently, looks very different:

• Senior engineers in LATAM who already work in modern stacks and U.S. product environments

• Time zone overlap that makes real‑time collaboration normal

• Embedded engineers working in your Slack, your repos, your rituals

• A partner that owns sourcing, vetting, payroll, equipment, and secure infra so you’re not reinventing the wheel

The key idea is this:

Global talent doesn’t have to be on a U.S. visa to be fully part of your team.

A tactical play for Seed–Series B SaaS: from H‑1B‑heavy to a portfolio approach

Here’s a practical way to rebalance without blowing up what you already have.

Step 1: Separate must‑be‑U.S. from nearshore‑ready engineering work

With your CTO/VP Eng, look at your next 6–12 months of engineering needs:

Must‑be‑U.S.:

• Deeply regulated domains that legally require U.S. employment or on‑site presence

• Roles tightly tied to in‑person sales or customer interaction in the U.S.

Nearshore‑ready:

• Backend, frontend, full‑stack, platform, DevOps, QA automation, data engineering

• Work where success depends more on time zone overlap, collaboration, and product context than on physical location

For most SaaS teams, a meaningful portion of engineering work is nearshore‑ready if you’re honest about it.

Step 2: Define what “great at 90 days” looks like for nearshore engineers

For each nearshore‑ready role, write down:

• Output expectations (features shipped, bugs resolved, projects moved forward)

• Quality signals (PR review quality, test coverage, incident handling)

• Ownership behaviors (proactivity, communication, reliability)

• Non‑negotiables (stack experience, English fluency, time zone, equipment, backup internet/power, security practices)

Most nearshore attempts fail because this is never defined. The “plan” is essentially: “We’ll hire someone and see how it goes.”

Step 3: Run a 90‑day embedded engineering pilot, not a random trial

Now, instead of saying “we’ll just grab someone from Upwork when we’re behind,” design a real test:

• Pick the bottleneck that hurts you most: shipping features or stabilizing reliability/tech debt.

• Build a small nearshore engineering pod (for example 2–5 engineers) around that outcome.

• Integrate them into your normal rituals: standups, retros, demos, incident calls, product reviews.

• Measure them against the 90‑day success definition you wrote down.

A well‑structured pilot should also make it easy to adjust if someone is not a fit:

• Engineers should be billable like normal team members once you approve them and they start contributing.

• You should have the option to stop working with anyone during the pilot if they are not meeting the performance bar, without being locked into a long commitment.

• Replacements should not trigger a whole new round of extra recruiting or “strategy” fees on top.

At Puzzle, our 90‑day engineering pilot is built around exactly those principles:

• Every engineer you approve and start working with is billable from day one, like any other team member.

• During the 90 days, you can stop working with any engineer at any point if they are not meeting your expectations. There is no long‑term lock‑in or penalty.

• When that happens, we run the replacement search and talent strategy work at our cost. You only pay the standard rate for the replacement engineer once you approve them and they join your team.

The goal is to let you treat nearshore engineering as a serious part of your hiring system:

• Clear expectations

• Clear scorecards

• A clean way to course‑correct if someone isn’t a keeper

Step 4: Make nearshore part of your headcount plan, not a one‑off hack

Once the pilot proves itself, nearshore becomes a deliberate part of your planning:

• A defined lane in your hiring model for engineering (not “if we get stuck, we’ll try a contractor”)

• A way to extend runway without downgrading talent quality

• A hedge against H‑1B policy swings that you can’t control

Now to your board and your team you’re not saying,
“We hope we win the H‑1B lottery.”

You’re saying,“We have a blended strategy: U.S. hires where they must be local, H‑1B where it still makes sense, and embedded LATAM engineers where location doesn’t matter but quality and cost do.”

Where Puzzle fits in this new reality

Our mission at Puzzle is simple:

Help bold companies achieve the growth they’re looking for, and give talented people a community where they can grow and thrive.

For a U.S. SaaS company between Seed and Series B (11–200 people), that means:

• Acting as your strategy‑first nearshore engineering partner, not a resume shop

• Mapping your roadmap, bottlenecks, and org design before talking about “how many engineers”

• Building embedded engineering teams in LATAM – backend, frontend, full‑stack, DevOps, QA – fully integrated into your tools, rituals, and culture

• Owning sourcing, vetting, payroll, benefits, equipment, and secure infra, so your team just gets engineers who can execute

Your immigration attorney gave you a process for H‑1B when that was a central lever.
We give you a process for nearshore engineering now that the rules have changed.

You don’t control policy.
You do control your talent strategy.

At Puzzle, this is the work we do every day with Seed–Series B SaaS teams.

If you want to explore whether a 90‑day, strategy‑first nearshore engineering pilot makes sense for your company, you can schedule a free hiring strategy session with our team.