Open to remote: European employers advertising fully remote roles without being remote-first

TL;DR

  • Four employers on the Remote Work Europe jobs board are advertising 162 fully remote European roles between them, and not one of them is a remote-first company. Monzo, Alan, Pennylane and Nebius all run offices and all expect most staff to use them.
  • The hard rule these companies share: they hire remotely only inside countries where they already employ people. Monzo’s 34 remote roles are every one of them United Kingdom.
  • Remote eligibility inside one company splits by function, country and language – at Alan, all six Belgian sales roles are fully remote and all fourteen French sales roles are office-anchored.
  • This is a separate list from our remote-first hub, and it is deliberately a moving one. An employer can be open to remote this quarter and not the next.

Our remote-first companies hub covers the employers who built themselves without offices. It is a good list. It is also a small one, and everybody who wants a remote job in Europe is applying to it.

This is the other list.

These are employers who are not remote-first. They have headquarters. They have office attendance expectations, sometimes written into the advert in days per week. And they are, at the same time, advertising roles that are specified as one hundred per cent remote.

Remote Work Europe tracks live vacancies from more than two hundred European employers’ own applicant tracking systems, and this pattern accounts for a large share of the genuinely remote work we see. It is also the least documented, because a company with an office does not put out a press release about the third of its roles that never come in.

What “open to remote” means, and why it is a separate list

What is an open-to-remote employer? An open-to-remote employer is a company that is not remote-first – it has offices, and most of its people work from or near them – but which advertises specific roles as fully remote. The remote arrangement belongs to the role, not to the company. Two people at the same employer, on the same pay grade, can have completely different answers to “do I have to come in?”, and the difference is usually their function or their country rather than their seniority.

That is the whole reason this needed its own hub rather than a section in the existing one. A remote-first employer gives you one answer and it applies everywhere. An open-to-remote employer gives you an answer per advert.

We apply one rule to everything we list, and it is strict: the advert must specify the role as fully remote. Not hybrid. Not “flexible”. Not “remote-friendly”. If an employer says three days a week in the office, that role does not go on our board, however good it is. We are not interested in relitigating the hybrid argument – we are interested in the roles that are unambiguously remote inside companies that are unambiguously not.

Why applying to a company that is not remote-first is a legitimate strategy

There is a reasonable objection to this whole idea, and it deserves an answer before the list.

If a company is built around offices, are you not signing up to be the exception? To be the person who misses the corridor conversation, gets forgotten at promotion time, and is first out when the policy changes?

Sometimes, yes. That risk is real and we will not pretend otherwise. But three things sit on the other side of it.

The remote-first list is the most contested job market in Europe. Every remote jobseeker on the continent knows those thirty companies. When Automattic or Doist advertise, they are choosing from thousands of applicants who have all specifically sought them out. An open-to-remote employer advertising one fully remote role in Poland is fishing in a far smaller pond, because their brand does not attract remote applicants in bulk.

The roles are frequently better suited to somebody making their first move into remote work. These are established companies with established functions. They are hiring an accountant, a compliance manager, a customer success lead – jobs with decades of on-site precedent, where what you did in an office genuinely qualifies you. That makes a good number of them remote gateway roles: roles where you can bring the experience you already have into a first remote setting, because nothing in the advert asks you to prove you have worked remotely before.

The category is dynamic, and that is a feature. A company that opened a Barcelona office last year may be hiring remotely across Spain this year and hybrid-only next year. Remote-first is an identity and it changes slowly. Open to remote is a decision, made function by function, and it changes constantly. Watching it closely is worth more than knowing it once.

Which European employers are advertising fully remote roles without being remote-first?

These are the four we have researched in full and can evidence. Figures are live roles on the Remote Work Europe board on 7 September 2026.

EmployerFully remote European rolesWhere those roles can be doneWhat the company actually is
Nebius74Netherlands 42, UK 25, Germany 13, plus Europe-wide listingsAmsterdam-headquartered AI infrastructure firm, ~1,543 staff, stated policy of one to two days working from home
Monzo34United Kingdom onlyUK bank with offices in London, Cardiff, Dublin, Barcelona and Madrid
Alan29France 20, Belgium 15, Spain 5French health insurer with offices in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels and Ghent
Pennylane25France 14, Germany 12French accounting software company, Paris HQ and a Berlin office

Deep dives: Monzo · Alan · Pennylane · Nebius · Veeam · Datadog · NICE · Bending Spoons

What happened when we researched the next eight

We took the eight remaining employers on our board that looked like they fitted, and put each through the four checks below. Three qualified. Five did not, and it is worth publishing that ratio, because it is the clearest evidence we can offer that the category means something.

Qualified: Veeam (236 adverts, half of them hybrid), Datadog (“we operate as a hybrid workplace with a few remote opportunities”), NICE (publishes a two-day office week and calls it NiCE-FLEX).

Did not qualify, all on their own words:

EmployerWhat they actually say
Coinbase”We are a remote-first company” – FY2025 Form 10-K, filed with the SEC
Chainguard”Flexible & Remote-First Culture” – in all 81 of its adverts
Secfix”We are an equal-opportunity employer and remote-only company”
saas.group”We’re 100% remote”
Electrify”We work remotely. We have a diverse global workforce”

That is five companies we would have been wrong about if we had gone on role counts and a hunch. Coinbase in particular states its model in a document it can be sued over.

How do fully remote roles separate inside a company with offices?

This is the question the deep dives exist to answer, and there is a consistent structure underneath it.

The country rule: remote means remote inside one country

This is the most important thing on the page, and it is rarely stated plainly.

These companies hire remotely only where they already have a legal entity and a payroll. “Fully remote” almost never means “anywhere in Europe”. It means “anywhere in the country we can already employ you in”.

Monzo is the clearest case. Thirty-four fully remote roles, and every single one requires you to live in the United Kingdom. The standard wording is “we’re open to distributed working within the UK”. Monzo has an EU headquarters in Dublin and offices in Barcelona and Madrid with over fifty employees – and not one advert offers remote work anywhere in the EU. If you are in Spain, Monzo is hiring near you, on two to three days a week in an office.

Alan is the exception that proves the rule. Its thirteen fully remote engineering roles read “Anywhere in France, Belgium, Spain” – genuinely cross-border, and the only such option on its board. Every other remote role at Alan is locked to a single country.

Pennylane publishes the most precise version of the rule anyone gives: you may work remotely “from your country of residence, as long as it is in Europe and within a maximum time difference of two hours from the CET time zone”. Its German adverts are tighter still, and say in German that your residence must be in Germany.

Nebius states in every one of its 376 adverts that “applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply”, with no sponsorship offered anywhere. That is unusually honest, and it tells you exactly where you stand before you spend an evening on the application.

The function rule: some departments are remote and some are not

Within one company, remote eligibility tracks the department far more than the job level.

At Monzo, Data is the most remote-friendly function – ten of eleven roles are UK-remote, up to and including Director of Data. Product has no remote route at all: all five roles are London or Barcelona. Finance is largely London with a stated two days a week.

At Alan, the split is sharper still and it runs along a border. All six Belgian sales roles are “Anywhere in Belgium”. All fourteen French sales roles are anchored to a city – Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Annecy or Biarritz. Same company, same function, opposite answer depending on which country you are in.

And the assumption that senior people must be on site does not hold. Alan’s Head of Insurance Legal Counsel is fully remote. Monzo’s Director of Data is remote-eligible. Meanwhile Alan’s Founding Engineer role is Paris, on site. Do not screen yourself out on seniority.

Where regulation binds, it usually binds to a jurisdiction rather than to a desk. Monzo’s Dublin, Madrid and Barcelona risk roles are conditional on the Central Bank of Ireland’s Fitness and Probity Standards, which is why they are office-anchored and travel-bearing. Alan’s insurance compliance work, equally regulated, is “Anywhere in France” – the constraint there shows up as a country lock and a language lock instead.

The language rule: the filter that hides in plain sight

For anyone reading a European job board in English, this is the requirement most likely to end an application, and it rarely appears in the location line.

At Alan, the engineering adverts say “Fluent in English (no need to speak French!)”. Nearly every other remote function requires the local language at a high bar: Insurance Compliance Counsel needs bilingual French and English, a customer care legal role specifies C1 French for correspondence with the CNIL, and the Belgian roles need Dutch, not French.

Pennylane is starker. Of 149 live adverts, three state that French is not required, and all three are in Tech. Two Product roles flagged “Remote Europe” both demand fluent French, one of them for running user interviews. Its German roles ask for C2 or native German.

Read the requirements section before the location line. The location tells you where you may live; the language tells you whether you can have the job.

Remote Work Europe Connected

Every role discussed here came off our members’ jobs board – daily curated fully remote roles from European employers’ own systems, hand-checked, no scams and no dead links.

It is €15 a month, and the roles are all public. What you are paying for is the sweep, and a human tagging the ones that fit you by name.

→ See what Connected includes

How we research and define an open-to-remote employer

We are describing our method here because the definition only means something if it is applied the same way every time.

For each candidate we pull every live advert from the employer’s own applicant tracking system rather than from an aggregator, and read the full text of each one. Then four checks:

  1. Does the company describe itself as remote-first? Its own words, from its own careers site, dated where a date is published.
  2. Does it have offices, and does it state attendance expectations? A published “three days a week” is the clearest possible evidence that the company is not remote-first.
  3. Are there roles specified as one hundred per cent remote? Not flexible, not hybrid, not remote-friendly.
  4. How do those roles separate – by country, by function, by language, by regulatory status?

An employer needs to fail check one, pass checks two and three, and give us something real on check four before it belongs in this hub.

Seven candidates have failed check one so far, and we would rather publish that than quietly drop them. Affirm states in its own advert boilerplate that it “is proud to be a remote-first company”; Twilio has not announced a return to office and every one of its roles begins “Remote –”. Both belong in the remote-first hub, and we moved them. The five in the table above went the same way.

The failure rate is the point. Role volume looks like evidence and is not: several of these companies advertise more fully remote European roles than the ones that qualified. What separates them is whether the company is built that way or has decided it role by role – and only reading what they say about themselves tells you which.

What this means for how you apply

Four practical consequences.

Check the country before anything else. The single most common wasted application in this category is a well-qualified person in the wrong country applying to a role that was only ever open in one.

Read the advert body, not the job board’s remote filter. Tagging is unreliable at exactly the companies where it matters most. At Monzo, one Lead Data Scientist advert is filtered as “Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)” while its body reads “London or Barcelona”. At Pennylane, one prominent “Engineering Manager” listing says in its own text that it is a talent pool with no live vacancy behind it.

Ask about cadence at first interview. Alan’s fully remote adverts also carry the line “We offer remote work flexibility, but we value in-person collaboration”, with no stated frequency. That is not a red flag on its own. It is an unanswered question, and the first interview is when to answer it.

Watch for what an employer asks you to prove. If an advert does not demand previous remote experience, that silence is useful information about how contested the role is. Being able to insist on remote experience is a supply-side luxury – an employer who asks for it is telling you the queue is long.

Frequently asked questions

Is a fully remote role at a non-remote-first company less secure? It carries a different risk, not necessarily a larger one. The protection that matters is whether your arrangement is written into your contract rather than granted informally. In Spain, for example, remote work above 30% of your hours requires a signed agreement under Ley 10/2021, and the percentage cannot be changed without your written consent. Ask what your arrangement rests on before you accept.

Why do these companies only hire remotely in some countries? Because employing somebody creates payroll, tax and social security obligations in their country of residence, and most companies will only take those on where they already have an entity. It is an administrative constraint far more than a cultural one – which is also why the list changes whenever a company opens somewhere new.

Do open-to-remote employers sponsor visas? Some do and most do not say. Monzo sponsors UK visas on around fifteen roles and states it in the advert. Nebius states in all 376 of its adverts that you must already hold the right to work. Alan mentions sponsorship exactly once across 112 adverts, to rule it out for one role. Treat silence as unanswered rather than as a no, and ask.

Are these roles suitable for someone who has never worked remotely? Often, yes – more so than the remote-first employers. These are conventional functions inside conventional companies, so on-site experience counts as the qualification. What matters is whether the advert asks you to prove remote-native behaviour, or simply asks you to prove you can do the job.

How often is this list updated? The role counts come from our jobs board, which rebuilds daily from employers’ own systems. The employer profiles are reviewed as we publish each deep dive, and any employer that announces a return-to-office policy moves out of this hub.

Sources