The Signal · Column 092

Europe Keeps the Engineers and Loses the Employers

Andrei van Noordt · 23 October 2026 · 2 min read

An executive at AWS put a number on something European founders have been saying quietly for two years. Roughly forty percent of European startups are considering leaving the region in order to scale. The usual response to a figure like that is a policy argument about capital, compliance and ambition. I want to talk about what it does to a hiring plan, because that is the part that lands on my desk.

Here is what most people reading that headline picture, and what almost never happens. They picture a company packing up and going. In practice what leaves is the holding structure, the cap table, the board, the letterhead and sometimes two founders. The engineering team stays exactly where it was, because people have mortgages in Amsterdam and partners with jobs in Eindhoven and children in school in Ghent. Europe does not lose the talent in these moves. It loses the employer.

The company leaves on paper. The engineers stay on the ground, and somebody else's budget comes to find them.

That distinction is the whole repricing. When a company redomiciles and keeps building here, it starts paying for local engineers out of a foreign budget, against foreign comparables, on foreign equity terms. Your competitor for a staff machine learning engineer in Utrecht is no longer the three firms you benchmark against at the quarterly peer review. It is an entity with a Delaware parent, an employer of record arrangement and no particular loyalty to the Dutch salary band you agreed in January.

The senior layer feels this first and most. There were never many people in this market who have shipped production AI systems at scale, and every one of them is now reachable by companies that have structurally decided to pay above the local norm. Junior hiring stays local and competitive. Senior hiring has quietly gone global without anybody moving house, which means your offer is being compared to offers you will never see.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Stop benchmarking senior AI and data pay against the companies you can see down the road, and benchmark it against whoever can hire your people remotely without relocating them. If that number makes your current band look thin, you have found the reason your last two senior offers went quiet.