What are the best ways to get hired in the US as a software engineer from the UK?
I’ll be graduating with a masters in CS from a top university in 2023.
Find a job with a US company that has a UK presence (a multinational like Google, Facebook etc.) and get promoted enough (e.g: to Engineering Manager) to be eligible for an L1 visa, then request to transfer from the UK to the US. The L1 visa process is the easiest, and has a path to citizenship.
(UK salaries are competitive enough nowadays that it's not really worth it for financial reasons, given the financial risks associated with the US. If you want to go for non-financial reasons, have at it.)
How are UK salaries competitive? Even in London, salaries are, at best, 50% of what they are in Silicon Valley for 'typical' companies. At FAANG companies (e.g.: the Google/FB/etc London offices), they are about 70% of what they are in Silicon Valley. Cost of living is higher in SV, but not that much higher.
I believe that 70% is very, very competitive — I’d go as far as to say 70% of an SF salary, in London, is better. There’s a bunch of considerations, not just the cost of living, but things like healthcare, which allow for a high-earner to better leverage their earnings to improve their quality of life.
There’s a higher density of well-funded companies in the US who can afford to pay high salaries, so it’s easier to find a high salary, but if you find a well-funded company in the UK (of which there are many, and growing) then you can earn comparably high amounts.
If you have a £150k salary in the UK — which is easy enough at Google, Facebook etc. — you will have a very high standard of living, so much so, that moving to the US to earn $300k/year at the same company would have very little impact on quality of life.
+1. Housing costs a fortune in both London and Silicon Valley. London has an excellent rail network so if you could WFH somewhere with much cheaper housing 3 days a week that could work. Although the NHS is underfunded to breaking point, private healthcare and insurance is much cheaper in UK than USA. Reasons to move to the US would be for adventure, experiencing another country, the great outdoors, all the things USA offers. Probably not for financial reasons anymore. This used to be different but UK tech salaries got better. Of course, who knows what the long-term holds for UK, with Brexit, higher inflation than other countries, the union breaking apart (Scotland leaving), political instability etc.. Not that USA is a perfectly stable country either ;)
This isn't as easy as it once was, I believe. I did precisely this about 25 yrs ago, then ultimately returned to the UK. At that time you could get a H1B visa as long as they paid you the market rate and had advertised the job sufficiently at home first. Once you had a H1B you could transfer the visa between employers if you got another job, although not entirely simple. Since then, rules have changed so you have to earn a lot of money to qualify - though this may be do-able on a FAANG salary after a couple yrs experience. Also numbers of visas are capped so you might not even get one. So you could try L1 route as sibling post suggested, although, then you have to rise in that company a little bit , then you're quite beholden to them if you transfer - once in the USA, not so easy to transfer so what happens if you're unhappy in your job? Maybe you should do a Phd and try to get classified as "alien of extraordinary ability". (I love this terminology ;). ). That opens other doors possibly to visa independent of employer. In short- its not easy for a foreigner to go and work in tech in the US these days, and that in itself may explain some of the salary inflation that is being seen, hence the original Q on HN at all.
Apply to an internship or inquire about job opportunities through the career service of your university. Large US companies recruit directly from the few top UK universities and will be happy to send you to the US if that’s what you wish. But if it’s money you are after, I would personally stay in the UK and go work in finance.
Do some cool open source stuff. Since August 9th, I received about 50 job offers mentioning this repo: https://github.com/DeutscheKI/tevr-asr-tool Most of them were senior engineer or AI researcher, with a few CTO / co-founder offers sprinkled in. I'm not in the market and this was a bit unexpected to me, but those emails sounded like they would pay well. And most was remote for US companies.
https://www.nnuimmigration.com/l1-visa-to-green-card/
(UK salaries are competitive enough nowadays that it's not really worth it for financial reasons, given the financial risks associated with the US. If you want to go for non-financial reasons, have at it.)