How to hire remote software engineers in Nigeria

Where the engineers actually are

Lagos concentrates most of the senior engineering population, with Yaba and Lekki the densest clusters. Abuja is smaller but growing and skews toward infrastructure, government-adjacent and enterprise work.

The more useful split is not city but employer history. The strongest candidates have usually passed through one of the large local fintechs or a foreign remote-first company. Those two paths produce quite different engineers: the first tends to be strong on payments, reconciliation and scale under unreliable infrastructure, the second on asynchronous communication and codebase discipline.

A meaningful share of the market is already working remotely for teams outside the country. That is your real competition — not other local employers.

What to pay, and in which currency

Two markets exist side by side. Locally-funded companies pay in naira on a local band. Foreign remote employers pay in dollars, and their bands are several multiples higher in local terms.

If you are hiring from outside the country, you are competing in the second market whether or not you meant to. Benchmarking against local naira salaries will simply lose you every candidate who has a dollar-denominated alternative — which, at senior level, is most of them.

Currency choice is itself part of the offer. Naira salaries lose purchasing power to inflation between review cycles, so a headline number that looked competitive in January may not in December. Either pay in a stable currency or commit in writing to a review cadence.

See live salary medians by role and country

Contract structure is part of the offer

Most cross-border hires are structured as contractor agreements or through an employer-of-record. Contractor agreements are faster and cheaper to set up, and push tax and benefits onto the individual. An employer-of-record costs more per head and gives the candidate a real employment relationship, paid leave and statutory contributions.

Senior candidates increasingly ask which one you are offering before they engage. Answering vaguely reads as a company that has not done this before, and it is a common reason strong candidates stop replying.

Whichever you choose, be explicit about payment rails and timing. Late or expensive transfers are a recurring complaint and a genuine reason people leave otherwise good roles.

Run a process senior people will actually finish

Multi-stage take-home exercises fail here for the same reason they fail everywhere: the people you most want have the least free time and the most alternatives. A four-hour unpaid exercise is a filter that selects against seniority.

Keep it to three stages: a conversation about the work, a paid or time-boxed technical discussion grounded in something real, and a decision. Teams that close in about two weeks are almost always running fewer than four stages.

Publish the salary band in the first message. It removes the single most common reason a process collapses at offer stage, and it is why salary-transparent roles get materially higher reply rates.

The mistakes that cost teams candidates

Benchmarking against the wrong market. Anchoring on local naira bands when your candidate has dollar offers.

Going quiet between stages. A week of silence reads as rejection, and the candidate is usually in two other processes.

Leaving compensation to the end. If the number only appears at offer stage, you have spent everyone's time discovering a mismatch you could have surfaced in message one.

Treating time zones as the candidate's problem. Insisting on full overlap with a distant head office narrows your pool sharply, for little real gain.

Questions

Is it legal to hire someone in Nigeria as a contractor?

Yes, contractor agreements are common and legal for cross-border work. The risk is misclassification: if you control hours, tools and management the way you would for an employee, some jurisdictions will treat the relationship as employment regardless of what the contract says. An employer-of-record removes that ambiguity.

Should we pay in naira or dollars?

If you are competing against foreign remote employers — and at senior level you are — a stable currency is usually necessary to be competitive. If you pay in naira, commit to a written review cadence, because inflation erodes the value of a fixed band between reviews.

How long does it take to hire a senior engineer in Nigeria?

Two to six weeks depending on process length. The single biggest determinant is the number of interview stages, not the availability of candidates. Roles that publish a salary band and run three stages typically close in about two weeks.

Do we need a local entity?

No. Most cross-border hiring happens through contractor agreements or an employer-of-record, neither of which requires you to incorporate locally.

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