Top 6 Platforms to Hire Engineers from China [2026]

TL;DR: Arc.dev lists 417 vetted developers in China that you can browse without a Chinese entity, and Second Talent is the one platform here that both finds the engineer and employs them through its own China entity, at $4,500 to $5,500 a month for a senior. Toptal adds senior freelancers, Eleduck reaches remote developers in Chinese, and Deel (from $599 a month) or Remote ($699) employ whoever you find.

LinkedIn shut InCareer, its China jobs app, on 9 August 2023, and the domestic boards that replaced it (BOSS Zhipin, Liepin, Zhaopin) check each employer against a Chinese business licence and a +86 mobile number. Our guide to China's job boards covers them for companies that have an entity. Without one, you need a platform that signs the contract and moves the money, because an engineer in China can convert only $50,000 a year into yuan before the bank asks for the contract behind it.

The 6 Platforms Compared

The 6 Platforms, One by One

1. Arc.dev

Arc.dev suits a startup that wants to browse China-based engineers itself and decide later between a contractor and a full-time hire. Its China page listed 417 remote developers and experts available to hire in September 2026. Each profile carries the tag "Vetted developer in China (UTC+8)", and the first one on the page lists Tesla as a past employer and English, French and Mandarin as languages.

No other platform here publishes a searchable count of China-based engineers: Toptal and Second Talent show sample profiles, while Arc shows the number and lets you browse by role and skill. Arc claims its network is the top 2% of applicants and quotes up to 58% cost savings against local hiring, both figures from its own page.

Arc's pricing page splits hires into freelance and full-time. Freelancers bill $15 to $110 or more an hour, with a risk-free guarantee. A full-time hire costs 20% of the annual salary, once.

Arc's fee buys the introduction, not the employment: a full-time engineer in China still needs a legal employer, which means your own entity or an employer of record such as Deel or Remote below.

The freelance route has a payment ceiling worth planning for. Bank of China gives each person a $50,000 yearly quota for converting foreign currency into yuan, so a freelancer paid more than about $4,200 a month exhausts it within the year and must then show the bank the contract behind the payments.

Put a signed contract and monthly invoices in place from the first week. Our Arc.dev alternatives compare it with other vetted networks.

• Best for: founders who want to scan China-based profiles themselves before committing to one.
• Watch out: a full-time hire through Arc still needs an employer in China, and that cost sits outside Arc's 20%.
• What you pay: $15 to $110+ an hour for freelancers, or 20% of the first-year salary for a full-time hire.

2. Second Talent

Second Talent is for a company that wants a full-time engineer in China on its team without opening a WFOE or stitching a sourcing platform to a separate payroll provider. We do both halves: we find and vet the engineer, then employ them through our own entity in China, which runs the labour contract, housing fund, social insurance and income tax city by city.

Candidates pass four stages before a client sees them: a résumé and work-history review, role-specific coding challenges, a live English interview and reference checks. Fewer than 5% of applicants get through, and 92% of the talent we place stays on.

Clients get a shortlist within 24 to 48 hours, and our China entity can employ an engineer within 5 to 10 days of their acceptance. Our China hiring page shows the kind of profiles on the bench, from Unreal Engine developers who shipped at large Chinese studios to data engineers in Beijing.

Those monthly rates include the employment. The China developer rate card breaks them down by role. English is the real trade-off: China scored 464 in the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, 86th of 123 countries, so we test spoken English live rather than trusting a CV line. Whether the pool is worth that friction is the question in our piece on engineering talent in China.

• Best for: a long-term China hire, one to a team of five, with no entity and no second vendor for payroll.
• Watch out: a 12 to 13 hour gap to US Eastern time means one or two overlapping calls a day, not a shared workday.
• What you pay: $3,200 to $4,200 a month mid-level, $4,500 to $5,500 senior, $6,000 to $7,500 staff or lead, with nothing charged until you hire.

3. Toptal

Toptal is for a team that needs one senior freelancer within days and wants the platform, not the engineer, on the contract and the invoice. Its public profiles include engineers based in mainland China, such as a Shanghai software developer who has been a member since February 2018 and has led back-end work for Nike since 2017.

Toptal built its network outside China. Its FAQ says it has experts in more than 100 countries, "most being located in the Americas and Europe". Ask for China-based candidates by name in the brief, or the matcher will send the nearest good fit in a time zone you did not want.

The same FAQ sets out the terms. Toptal accepts fewer than 3% of the 200,000-plus people who apply each year. Toptal introduces candidates within 24 hours in almost all cases and says 90% of clients hire the first one.

Each engagement starts with a trial of up to two weeks that you are not billed for if it fails, and you can trial up to three experts per position. Toptal invoices you twice a month on Net 10 terms, so the contract and the payments run through Toptal rather than to an individual in China.

The hourly rate only appears after a call. Our Toptal alternatives page compares the networks that publish their rates.

• Best for: a senior contractor for a defined project, where speed matters more than price.
• Watch out: few China-based profiles, and a freelancer on a long engagement can drift into looking like an employee under Chinese law.
• What you pay: the engineer's unpublished hourly rate plus a flat $79 monthly subscription.

4. Eleduck (电鸭)

Eleduck is for an employer willing to recruit in Chinese, where the developers who already want remote work are. It calls itself China's earliest remote-work community, and its forum carried 20,768 posts when I checked it in September 2026, with its own channel for overseas roles. One featured listing that week offered a full-stack engineer 25K to 35K yuan a month on an overseas remote team.

Employers recruit through the remote talent pool (远程人才库), which lists only remote full-time roles, screens each employer by its own account, and coaches candidates one to one. The candidate pays Eleduck once they have received a full month's salary, and the employer price is not published.

The candidate table further down shows front-end, back-end, mobile and game developers in Hefei, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing, most working in Chinese and English.

The pool is small: 160 matches in total, 72 of them with overseas employers. Eleduck employs none of them, so an engineer you find there still needs a contract and a payroll route. The community rules encourage posting in English as practice, but a job post in Chinese reaches far more of the forum.

• Best for: reaching mainland developers who want remote work, in their own language, outside the licence-gated boards.
• Watch out: a Chinese-language interface, a small pool, and no employment or payment layer.
• What you pay: the employer fee for the talent pool is quoted on request; the community forum is free to read.

5. Deel

Deel is for a company that has already found its engineer, on Arc, Eleduck or through a referral, and needs someone to employ them in China. Deel says it runs wholly owned entities in 14 Chinese provinces, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu, and files social insurance and housing fund contributions at city level.

Its China page says a hire can start in as little as 7 days and estimates employer costs at 34.60% to 46.10% of salary.

Deel's own comparison puts the one-off cost of opening a China entity at RMB 20,000 to more than RMB 100,000, against nothing for an employer of record. Budget from the city, since contribution bases differ between Shanghai and Chengdu.

The same Deel guide lists what a disguised contractor risks: back pay, unpaid social insurance, and double wages when no written contract exists after a month.

Deel's pricing page starts employer of record at $599 per employee a month and contractor management at $49. Contractor of Record, at $325, moves the misclassification liability to Deel. For a China engineer on a two-year horizon, the EOR tier is the one that holds up, and our ranking of EOR providers in China compares Deel with the rest. Our Deel alternatives page sets it against other EOR providers.

• Best for: employing an engineer you sourced yourself, in any of Deel's 14 provinces.
• Watch out: Deel does not find or vet engineers, and the $599 is a starting price before city social insurance.
• What you pay: from $599 a month per employee, or $49 a month per contractor.

6. Remote

Remote is for a company already using it elsewhere whose China engineer lives in one of four provinces. Its China country explorer states that it can, for now, onboard employer-of-record hires only in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong and Zhejiang. That covers Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hangzhou, and rules out Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing and Xi'an.

Inside those provinces the terms follow Chinese law: a 30-day written notice period, probation of one to six months, and severance of a month's pay per year worked. Remote also pays contractors in China, and its China guide warns that misclassifying one can bring fines.

Remote's pricing page lists employer of record at $699 per employee a month and contractor management at $29. The $99 Contractor Management Plus tier adds up to $100,000 of cover per contractor for penalties.

• Best for: an engineer in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Shanghai or Beijing, at a company already on Remote.
• Watch out: no EOR coverage in 27 of China's 31 provincial-level regions.
• What you pay: $699 a month per employee, or $29 to $99 a month per contractor.

Hire an Engineer in China Without an Entity

Most teams on this list end up pairing two vendors: one to find the engineer and one to employ them. We do both under one contract. Browse AI engineers in China, check what a hire costs on our China cost-to-hire page, then tell us what you are building and we will send a shortlist within 48 hours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a foreign company hire an engineer in China without an entity?

Yes, through an employer of record, which employs the engineer on its own Chinese entity while you direct the work. Hiring a long-term contractor yourself is possible but risky, since Chinese courts judge the working relationship rather than the contract title. Our China payroll and tax guide sets out what each contribution costs.