TL;DR: AI engineers from Asia working for international clients earn $2,390 to $10,210+ a month on our rate cards, and we shortlist 6-8 Claude Code candidates within 24 hours. The BLS median for US software developers was $135,980 a year in May 2025.
Among developers who use or build AI agents, 40.8% had used Claude Code in Stack Overflow's 2025 survey. Anthropic released it as a research preview on 24 February 2025, so no candidate has more than about 19 months with the tool. Years of experience cannot separate candidates, so screen how they configure and constrain it.
Key takeaways
- Anthropic renamed the Claude Code SDK to the Claude Agent SDK on 29 September 2025, and the same agent loop runs in scripts and CI through
claude -p.
- Anthropic's documentation puts average enterprise Claude Code spend at around $13 per developer per active day, or $150-250 a month.
- A 5:00 pm to 2:00 am shift in Manila covers five hours of a 9-to-5 Eastern day while US daylight time runs.
- Code from an independent contractor is not "work made for hire" under US copyright law, so the contract needs a signed IP assignment.
What Claude Code Developers Earn Working for International Clients in Asia
Our rate cards have no Claude Code title, so the table uses our AI engineer rate cards, the closest match for engineers who build on the Claude API and run coding agents. The figure is what developers in that market earn working for foreign companies as their direct clients, before any employer or platform costs.
| Market |
Monthly pay working for international clients (USD) |
| Philippines |
$2,390-$4,790+ |
| India |
$2,610-$10,150+ |
| Malaysia |
$3,690-$7,370+ |
| Vietnam |
$3,870-$7,730+ |
| Indonesia |
$4,540-$10,210+ |
Monthly ranges from the Remote (Working for International Clients) figures on our rate cards for the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, converted at ExchangeRate-API mid-market rates for 14 September 2026.
Vietnam's range starts $1,480 above the Philippine one, and Indonesia's starts higher still. The Indian range runs from close to the Philippine floor to above $10,000, the widest spread of the five, so seniority moves the figure most there. All five ranges are open at the top.
Budget the tool as well as the engineer. The Claude Code cost documentation reports an average of around $13 per developer per active day across enterprise deployments, with 90% of users below $30 per active day. Our pricing page explains how we bill a Second Talent subscription.
US Pay Benchmark for Claude Code Developers
BLS has no occupation for developers who specialize in one AI tool. The role maps to Software Developers (15-1252), because a Claude Code developer writes, reviews and ships application code, using the agent and the Claude API as part of that work.
| BLS OEWS, May 2025, national |
Software Developers (15-1252) |
| 10th percentile, monthly |
$6,870 |
| 25th percentile, monthly |
$8,770 |
| Median, monthly |
$11,330 |
| 75th percentile, monthly |
$14,330 |
| 90th percentile, monthly |
$17,890 |
Monthly figures are the annual wages on the BLS OEWS profile for 15-1252 divided by 12 and rounded to the nearest $10. The annual median is $135,980.
These BLS figures are wages only. Tool spend, such as the $150-250 a month per developer that Anthropic reports for Claude Code, is a separate budget line for any hire.
Salary is only part of the US cost. In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, wages and salaries made up 68.5% of employer compensation costs for full-time private industry workers, and benefits the other 31.5%.
Time Zone Overlap with ET, CT and PT
Manila runs 12 hours ahead of New York until US clocks change on 1 November 2026, the end of daylight time per NIST. The Asian cities below do not observe daylight time.
| Engineer's city |
UTC offset |
9:00 am ET (EDT) |
9:00 am CT (CDT) |
9:00 am PT (PDT) |
| Manila, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei |
UTC+8 |
9:00 pm |
10:00 pm |
12:00 midnight |
| Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Bangkok |
UTC+7 |
8:00 pm |
9:00 pm |
11:00 pm |
| Bengaluru |
UTC+5:30 |
6:30 pm |
7:30 pm |
9:30 pm |
After 1 November 2026, every time in the table moves one hour later.
Agentic work changes what overlap is for. The engineer needs your morning to agree scope and review diffs, and can run longer agent tasks in the hours after your team logs off.
- Manila, 5:00 pm to 2:00 am (09:00 to 18:00 UTC) covers 5:00 am to 2:00 pm in New York: five hours of a 9-to-5 Eastern day, four with Chicago and two with San Francisco.
- Bengaluru, 3:30 pm to 12:30 am (10:00 to 19:00 UTC) covers 6:00 am to 3:00 pm Eastern, six hours with New York, five with Chicago and three with San Francisco.
- Ho Chi Minh City, 3:00 pm to midnight (08:00 to 17:00 UTC) covers 4:00 am to 1:00 pm Eastern, four hours with New York.
Employees on late shifts earn a premium. The Philippine Labor Code sets a night shift differential of at least 10% for work between 10 pm and 6 am (Article 86), four hours of the Manila shift. Vietnam's Labor Code adds at least 30% for work between 22:00 and 06:00 (Articles 98 and 106), the last two hours of the Ho Chi Minh City shift.
Claude Code Developer Skills to Screen For
In the same survey, 66% of developers named "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite" as a frustration, and 3.1% picked "highly trust" when asked about the accuracy of AI output. A Claude Code developer earns the salary by catching the almost-right diff before it merges. The six areas below test that.
Permission rules and sandboxing
Claude Code evaluates permission rules in a fixed order, deny, then ask, then allow, and a team can check those settings into version control. Its security documentation states that curl and wget are not auto-approved by default, as a guard against prompt injection. Ask the candidate for the settings file from their last project and the reasoning behind each deny rule.
CLAUDE.md, hooks and subagents
Project instructions live in CLAUDE.md files, which load at the start of each session as context, not as enforced configuration. To block an action whatever the model decides, the same page points to a PreToolUse hook, which runs before a tool call and can stop it. Subagents run in their own context window with their own tool access. A strong candidate can show a hook they wrote and explain what it stopped.
Headless runs and CI
Anthropic's Agent SDK announcement renamed the Claude Code SDK to reflect uses beyond coding. The CLI form, claude -p with an --allowedTools list, runs the agent without an interactive session, in scripts and pipelines. Ask how the candidate scoped tools for an unattended run, and what the job does when the agent fails.
Claude API integration and prompt caching
For product work on the API, caching sets the bill. On Anthropic's prompt caching page, the default cache lifetime is five minutes, a five-minute cache write costs 1.25 times the base input price, and a cache read costs 0.1 times it on most models. Ask the candidate where they placed cache breakpoints and what hit rate they measured.
MCP servers
Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol as an open standard on 25 November 2024. On 9 December 2025 it donated MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, and counted more than 10,000 active public MCP servers and 97M+ monthly SDK downloads. The engineer who has written an MCP server for an internal system has already decided how the agent authenticates and what it may read.
Reviewing agent output
Hand the candidate a pull request that Claude Code produced from a vague ticket, with one wrong assumption buried in it. Score whether they find it, whether they fix the ticket or the code, and what they add to CLAUDE.md so it does not happen twice.
Contractor or Employer of Record for a US Company
Software is not one of the nine categories of commissioned work that can be "work made for hire" under 17 U.S.C. § 101. That covers agent configuration as well as application code: a contractor's hooks, CLAUDE.md files and MCP servers stay theirs until transferred, and § 204(a) requires the transfer in writing, signed.
IRS Publication 515 says the place where someone performs the services determines the source of the income, wherever the parties signed the contract. A foreign individual gives the payer Form W-8BEN to certify foreign status.
Local law runs its own test. Philippine courts apply the four-fold test, and Atok Big Wedge v. Gison names control over the worker's conduct as the most important of the four. Article 13 of Vietnam's 2019 Labor Code treats an agreement under any name as a labor contract if it covers a paid job, wages and management or supervision.
|
Independent contractor |
Employer of Record |
| Legal employer |
None; the developer invoices you |
The EOR's local entity |
| US paperwork |
Form W-8BEN from the developer |
Service agreement with the EOR |
| IP |
Written assignment signed by the developer |
Assignment terms in the employment contract and EOR agreement |
| Local labor law |
Classification risk if the work looks like employment |
Night premiums, public holidays and leave apply |
| Pay currency |
Agreed in the contract |
In Vietnam, wages in the labor contract are stated in dong (Article 95) |
A contractor agreement fits a fixed job, such as wiring Claude Code into one repository's CI. A developer on your roadmap, inside your review process, meets the Philippine and Vietnamese tests for employment, and our Employer of Record service employs them in-country for you. This is a summary, not legal advice.
English Level and Working Norms
A Claude Code developer writes English for two readers: the agent, through CLAUDE.md and prompts, and your team, through pull request descriptions. Malaysia's IT workers score 590 on the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, the highest IT job-function score in the table.
| Country |
EF EPI 2025 score |
World rank (of 123) |
IT job-function score |
| Malaysia |
581 |
24 |
590 |
| Philippines |
569 |
28 |
581 |
| Vietnam |
500 |
64 |
500 |
| India |
484 |
74 |
487 |
| Indonesia |
471 |
80 |
523 |
Scores come from EF's country pages, such as Malaysia and Vietnam. The global average is 488.
Ask each finalist to write the CLAUDE.md section for one of your repositories. An unclear line in that file shows up in what the agent produces, so the exercise tests English and engineering judgment together.
Plan around both holiday calendars: Thanksgiving on 26 November 2026 is a working day in Asia, and an engineer there can clear the review queue while your US team is off. Vietnam's Labor Code gives five paid days for Lunar New Year (Article 112), so plan agent-heavy migrations around that week.
Claude Code Developer Hiring Process
Second Talent's vetting covers stages 2 to 5 before you see a profile. The checks below are the Claude Code versions to repeat in your own final round.
Stage 1: Define what the hire owns
Decide whether the role is product work on the Claude API, internal agent tooling, or feature delivery with Claude Code as the daily tool. Write down the repositories, the permissions the agent will have, and the overlap window.
Stage 2: Application review
Look for shipped work that shows configuration, not only output: a public repository with a CLAUDE.md file, a hook, a GitHub Actions workflow or an MCP server. Ask who reviewed the agent's changes before merge.
Stage 3: Skills assessment
Give a small repository with a failing test and a permission file that is too loose. The candidate fixes the test with Claude Code, tightens the permissions, and reports the session cost that Claude Code shows.
Stage 4: Live technical interview with a senior engineer
Review the assessment diff together, then ask the candidate to run the same task headless with claude -p and a restricted tool list. Probe what they would block with a hook.
Stage 5: Background and reference checks
Ask former managers how much of the candidate's agent-produced code needed rework and how they documented their setup. Then sign a contract that assigns the IP, as a contractor agreement or through an EOR.
Hire Claude Code Developers from Asia with Second Talent
We shortlist 6-8 candidates within 24 hours from 100,000+ pre-vetted engineers, accepting only the top 1% of applicants. Claude Code developers come with $0 upfront, no lock-in and 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours. We handle contracts, payroll and equipment, with compliant EOR contracts and payroll in 9 Asian markets.
Our pricing page covers the subscription, and for teams on other tools we also staff ChatGPT developers and Cursor developers.
