Engineering recruitment in
Lisbon

Lisbon is the primary hub for senior international hiring in Portugal and one of the fastest-growing nearshore technology and shared-services destinations in Europe. The city anchors the country's SaaS, fintech, gaming and customer-experience leadership, supported by strong English proficiency, a large multilingual talent pool and a lower cost base than Western Europe. Avenidas Novas and Saldanha carry corporate, finance and consulting leadership; Parque das Nacoes and Marvila concentrate scale-up and product teams; and the Web Summit ecosystem keeps a dense network of founders, operators and international senior talent close to the city.

A typical Go Ahead HiRe Lisbon brief is a US or UK SaaS scale-up landing its first Country Manager or building a Lisbon engineering, product or customer-experience hub, a Portuguese scale-up appointing senior commercial leadership, or an established European group consolidating Iberian leadership across Spain and Portugal. Indicative senior gross annual salaries in EUR run roughly 90,000 to 150,000 for a Country Manager or VP commercial, 70,000 to 110,000 for a Director, 55,000 to 85,000 for a Senior Manager, and 90,000 to 140,000 for VP Engineering or CFO and senior finance leadership. Portuguese senior comp generally sits below Germany, France and the Netherlands, with equity and bonus more common in scale-ups.

Lisbon senior search runs on a steady cadence. Permanent contracts (contrato de trabalho sem termo) are the norm for senior hires; notice periods commonly run 30 to 60 days and longer for executive contracts; and termination is regulated under the Portuguese Labour Code, with senior exits usually handled through negotiated settlement. International scale-up environments often operate in English, while domestic corporate and client-facing leadership is conducted in Portuguese, and Go Ahead HiRe maintains native Portuguese sourcing capacity for both. Most senior VP, Country Manager and Director searches close within 7 to 11 weeks of kickoff, with a calibrated longlist within 2 to 3 weeks.

Senior Portuguese hires typically carry one to three months notice at IC and Director level and longer for executives, often three to six months. Contracts are written in Portuguese under the Portuguese Labour Code (Codigo do Trabalho) even when the working language is English. Dismissal is tightly regulated: termination has to rest on a fair statutory ground (objective grounds, collective redundancy or just cause), follow a formal procedure and, in most cases, carry statutory severance, so settlement agreements (acordo de revogacao) are the common route for senior exits.

For non-EU candidates the EU Blue Card and the Tech Visa / D3 highly-qualified route are the default pathways; the Tech Visa pre-certifies the employer so consular and AIMA processing is materially faster for qualifying roles. On tax, the NHR successor regime IFICI (Incentivo Fiscal a Investigacao e Inovacao, often called "NHR 2.0") grants a flat 20 percent IRS rate on qualifying Portuguese-sourced employment income for up to ten years for eligible relocating professionals in qualifying activities. We model the gross-to-net impact of IFICI at shortlist stage on every relocation candidate and coordinate with specialist Portuguese payroll and immigration partners so the offer is signed without surprises.

Senior Lisbon engineering hires often carry a meaningful equity component, a sign-on bonus to bridge unvested equity from the previous employer and a compressed notice for time-critical platform or AI-team builds. We surface the equity-vs-cash trade-off in every offer brief.

City-specific Lisbon note: EU and EEA nationals work freely in Lisbon. Non-EU senior hires use Portugal's residence and work visa routes, including the Tech Visa programme for qualified technology roles and the D-series visas. Lisbon scale-ups and shared-services employers have mature relocation playbooks, and the city's lower cost base relative to Western Europe is a frequent closing factor for relocating senior candidates.