What Remote.com does

Remote Work Europe sees the daily pattern of European remote job postings through our Connected job board – the trends this piece describes show up there too.

Remote (the company behind remote.com) is a global employment platform. It handles the parts of international hiring that stop most companies cold – payroll, benefits, tax, compliance, and local employment law – so a business in one country can legally employ someone in another without opening a local entity. Founded in 2019 by Job van der Voort and Marcelo Lebre, it has grown into one of the larger players in the employer-of-record (EOR) space, alongside Deel and Oyster.

What sets Remote apart from some competitors is that it owns its own legal entities in the countries where it offers EOR services, rather than renting a third-party partner network. That means more control over the employee experience – contracts, payroll and benefits run through infrastructure Remote actually operates.

Remote culture: what it’s actually like

Remote describes itself as remote-first and fully asynchronous, with people working from locations they choose. The team spans more than 70 countries and over 90 nationalities, and there is no central office anyone is expected to show up to.

The most interesting cultural detail is that Remote employs its own staff through its own product. Every Remoter is hired and paid via the Remote platform, which creates a direct feedback loop – if onboarding is clunky or a payslip is wrong, the people fixing it are living the same experience. Using your own product at this scale is genuinely useful, and it shows up in how the platform evolves.

The honest assessment: the hypergrowth years are over. Remote scaled from a handful of people in 2020 to around 2,000 by 2024, and in 2026 the company publicly talked about growing revenue without adding headcount – a polite way of saying hiring has cooled and efficiency is now the priority. The EOR market is crowded and competitive, the pace is demanding, and some employee reviews mention restructuring and turnover behind the scenes. If you are expecting the open-tap hiring of the 2021 boom, that moment has passed.

Hiring in Europe: the details

Countries: Remote’s own workforce spans 70+ countries, with meaningful representation across Europe. Because they operate their own entities, they can employ people directly in many European markets rather than only through contractor arrangements.

Employment model: Direct employment through Remote’s own EOR infrastructure wherever they hold an entity; contractor arrangements elsewhere. As the company that sells this service, their internal setup is about as smooth as EOR gets.

Timezone expectations: Fully asynchronous by design. Most roles do not require fixed hours, though customer-facing and sales positions may ask for overlap with specific regions.

Salary approach: A structured, level-based compensation framework with equity options for all employees. Pay is benchmarked, and the company is reasonably open about how it sets bands – unsurprising, given compensation is part of what they sell.

Language requirements: English is the working language.

Who they’re looking for

Remote hires across the functions you would expect from a scaling HR-tech company:

  • Engineering (multiple stacks)
  • Product and design
  • Sales and business development
  • Customer success and support
  • Legal, compliance and payroll operations
  • Marketing and partnerships
  • People operations

Because the product is compliance-heavy, experience with international employment law, payroll, or global HR operations is a real advantage for non-engineering roles. The sales team is large and hires in cycles.

What current and former employees say

On the positive side, employees tend to praise the genuine flexibility, the calibre of colleagues, the equity upside, and the satisfaction of working on a product that expands where people are able to work. The async, location-independent model is described as the real thing rather than a slogan.

The cons are worth taking seriously. Reviews mention a fast, sometimes chaotic pace, shifting priorities as the company matured out of hypergrowth, and rounds of restructuring that have made some roles feel less secure than the headline “we hire everywhere” brand suggests. A few reviewers note that scale has brought more process and less of the early-stage autonomy. This is a company in its consolidation phase, not its land-grab phase – read openings with that in mind.

How to apply

Specific tips: Understand the EOR space before you apply – know the difference between contractor management, employer of record, and running your own payroll, and be able to say what makes Remote’s owned-entity model different from a partner-network competitor. For engineering roles, lean into the dogfooding angle: you will be building a product your own employer depends on daily. For compliance, payroll or people roles, concrete experience with cross-border employment is your strongest card. Applications that treat “remote work” as a perk rather than the actual problem the company solves tend to get filtered out quickly.

See our full guide to Remote-First Companies That Actually Hire in Europe.