Why U.S. Companies Are Building Engineering Teams in Poland

A team can ship exactly what was in the ticket and still miss what the business needed. Nobody stopped to ask why the ticket existed in the first place. That gap has nothing to do with where the team sits. It happens with local hires and offshore teams alike, and it’s usually the real reason an engineering partnership stalls, long before anyone gets to talking about rates.

Boldare has spent 20 years closing exactly that gap. The client’s business is always the starting point. Technology gets chosen afterward, to fit that business. Developers, product designers and QA work on the same team from day one, so nothing about the client’s problem gets lost once code enters the picture. That approach has a cost: Boldare is rarely the cheapest option in the room, and it has lost pitches over price. What it delivers instead is quality that a lower bid usually can’t match.

TeamAlert, a U.S. safety-technology company, hired Boldare for exactly this reason. They needed a partner that understood their product, not a team that would execute a backlog. Poland’s wider engineering market has followed a similar path over the last decade, and Polish software companies have also moved fast into AI development, building teams that deliver AI-native products at a level a lot of newcomers don’t expect.

What changed in Poland’s engineering market

The first partnerships between Polish engineering teams and international companies go back close to 20 years. Ten years ago, near the peak of that wave, Poland’s pitch to international companies was still mostly about cost and capacity: a large pool of computer science graduates, competitive rates, EU time-zone proximity. For some U.S. companies, that was the whole story. Others were already choosing Poland for a different reason: engineers who were simply exceptional. That pitch still holds today. It’s just no longer the main one.

As international companies moved from short-term outsourcing contracts toward long-term product partnerships, expectations on both sides changed. Companies stopped asking Polish teams to build what was in the ticket and started asking them to own outcomes: understand the business context, flag risk before it gets expensive, and make architectural calls without escalating every decision back to a lead in the U.S.

That shift changed how Polish engineering companies organize themselves. Engineers increasingly work embedded with product managers and designers instead of behind a request queue, and firms compete on decision-making quality as much as delivery speed.

What the Netflix tech hub shows about Poland

In March 2026, Netflix marked ten years in Poland by opening a new Warsaw office and reaffirming it as the company’s only technology hub outside the United States. The office houses around 300 people across content, engineering, marketing, global affairs, communications, finance and talent. That’s a different number than the “300 engineers” some coverage implies. Netflix has said its engineering footprint in Warsaw has grown significantly since the hub was established in 2023, and will keep expanding, with additional focus on infrastructure, gaming and production technology.

More telling than headcount is how Netflix describes what the Warsaw team is trusted to do. In a video interview below, CTO Elizabeth Stone put it directly:

“We don’t want the Warsaw teams to simply extend teams in other parts of the world. We want them to have full ownership.”

That’s a deliberate design choice. Full ownership only works if the team has the technical judgment to earn it. Otherwise it’s just distributed risk with extra time zones. Netflix structuring the hub this way says something about the caliber of engineering talent available in Poland. It says much less about Poland being cheap or convenient.

If you’re not building at Netflix’s scale, the lesson isn’t “go open a 300-person office.” It’s that one of the most scrutinized engineering organizations in the world evaluated Poland on judgment, not just capacity, and concluded it held up.

TeamAlert: a company that looks like yours

Most companies reading this aren’t Netflix, and don’t need a case study ten times their size to make a decision.

TeamAlert, the U.S.-based safety-technology company mentioned earlier,went through a version of the same evaluation at a scale that will look more familiar. According to CEO Allan Wilson, the company cared less about finding the cheapest or the biggest team and more about finding a partner with real technical depth and enough flexibility to adjust scope as priorities shifted.

Wilson had the questions most U.S. leaders have before working with a team overseas: how communication would hold up, how legal and contractual differences would play out, whether the time difference would slow decisions down. In practice, those concerns mattered less than expected. What mattered was whether the team understood the product well enough to push back when something didn’t make sense, without a translator sitting between engineering and the business.

That’s the same pattern Netflix describes at a completely different scale: ownership builds trust faster than distance erodes it.

Questions worth asking before you choose a team in Poland

Skip the vendor decks. If you’re seriously comparing partners for your next engineering team in Poland, or anywhere else, these are the questions worth spending time on.

• Are they AI-native, or just AI-aware? Plenty of teams can talk about AI. Fewer have actually rebuilt how they work around it: reviewing AI-generated code with the same rigor as human-written code, using it to speed up testing and documentation, not just autocomplete. Ask what changed in their day-to-day process, not just which tools show up on their website.
• Do they have a track record with U.S. companies, backed by reviews you can check? Time zones, communication norms and contracting expectations work differently with U.S. clients than with European ones. Look for verified reviews, Clutch is a common place to start, rather than relying only on the case studies a company chooses to publish itself.
• Will they push back? Ask how they’ve handled disagreeing with a product decision. Teams with real ownership have a specific answer. Teams built purely to execute usually don’t.
• What’s the real overlap with your working hours? Poland sits roughly six to nine hours ahead of U.S. time zones, depending on coast. Allan Wilson has talked openly about managing exactly this gap with TeamAlert. It’s a real constraint, not a footnote, so ask how a specific partner structures standups, reviews and incident response around it, rather than accepting “we’re flexible” at face value.
• What does their track record look like on systems like yours? Two decades of Polish software companies working with global clients has produced firms with genuine depth in specific domains: SaaS platforms, regulated industries, legacy modernization, cloud migration. Depth in your domain matters more than a long client logo list.
• What happens after launch? Plenty of partnerships get evaluated on the first release and never again, until the person who understood the original decisions has moved to a different account. Ask directly how continuity is handled once the initial build is done.

None of this is unique to Poland. It’s what should determine any engineering partnership, anywhere. Poland just happens to be where a large number of teams can currently answer these questions well.

If you’re weighing this decision

The Netflix story is useful context, but it isn’t proof that any given team in Poland will work for you. No market-level story is. The more useful test is the one TeamAlert ran: talk to a team, ask the questions above, and see whether the answers sound like ownership or like a sales pitch.

Allan Wilson walked through exactly that evaluation in a short interview: what worried him going in, what changed his mind, and what the partnership with Boldare looked like day to day. If you’re going through the same decision right now, it’s a more useful twenty minutes than another vendor call.

Watch the interview with Allan Wilson, CEO of TeamAlert →

FAQ

1. Why do U.S. companies build engineering teams in Poland instead of hiring locally?
   Mostly speed and depth, not just cost. Senior engineering roles in the U.S. can take months to fill; Poland’s larger, experienced talent pool lets companies build a working team faster without lowering the technical bar.
2. Is Poland only relevant for large companies like Netflix?
   No. Netflix’s hub is a signal about the quality of talent available, not a template to copy. Smaller companies, TeamAlert included, go through a similar evaluation at a scale that fits an 80- or 200-person organization.
3. How much time-zone overlap is there between Poland and the U.S.?
   Poland is roughly six to nine hours ahead of U.S. time zones. It’s manageable for most companies with the right meeting structure, but it should be discussed explicitly with any partner, not assumed away.
4. What should we ask before choosing an engineering partner in Poland?
   Beyond rates and CVs: how the team handles disagreement, what the real overlap with your hours looks like, what domain experience they bring, and how they handle continuity after the first release ships.
5. Does engineering ownership actually change outcomes?
   It changes how many decisions get escalated back to you. Teams that own outcomes catch architectural risk earlier and need less oversight over time. That’s the real value most companies are buying when they say they want a partner instead of a vendor.