4 Reasons To Build Your Software Engineering Team in Canada
Introduction
Canada is a magnet for tech talent.
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Cities like Toronto and Vancouver continuously broke venture funding records in 2021. According to recent data, tech firms raised a remarkable $11.8 billion by the end of Q3 alone.
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There’s probably never been a better time for the tech industry in Canada in terms of talent, growth, and innovation, and it’s not just Canadian businesses that are benefiting.
More and more US-based companies have turned North to expand software engineering teams, from venture-backed startups to large enterprises.
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If you’re on the fence about expanding your team in Canada, there are massive opportunities from coast to coast, with talent being a key driver for crossing the border.
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This article will expand on four reasons to choose Canada as the destination to develop your software engineering team.
01
Canada Produces World-Renowned High-Skilled Tech Talent
02
Canada Has Some of The Largest, Fastest-Growing Tech Hubs in The World
03
Canada Has A Wealth of Tech Talent From World-Leading Companies
04
Experience Partners Can Help You Expand In The Canadian Tech Market
1. Canada Produces World-Renowned Tech Talent
2021 underscored Canada’s status as a leading destination for employers seeking tech talent. Canada is becoming home to a new wave of ambitious entrepreneurs and enterprises attracted by a diverse and highly educated talent pool.
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Canadian tech talent markets aren’t just on the rise; they’re at the top. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa rank in CBRE’s top 20 tech talent markets in North America. With more than 2.8 million STEM graduates and the world’s highest educated workforce, the depth and quality of Canada’s tech talent pool are undeniable.
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Canada’s top-tier education system forms the foundation for the quality of tech labor the country offers. Specifically, the top five ranked Canadian tech cities also produce the highest number of tech graduates.
Montreal has three of the top 10 university-level computer science programs as ranked by Maclean’s. It produces the highest volume of tech graduates, followed by Toronto, Vancouver, Waterloo Region, and Ottawa. Outside of these top five-ranked cities, many tech degrees come from Halifax, Windsor, and Edmonton, where each sees over 1,000 tech degrees awarded annually.
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Plus, Canada has a rich history of producing strong engineering talent. It continues to grow as a major tech center with some of the most reputable technology innovators educating Canada’s future tech workforce.
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto
Touted as one of the “Godfathers of AI” and “Godfathers of Deep Learning,” Hinton is a deep learning pioneer, world-renowned for his work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and artificial neural networks. On top of teaching at the University of Toronto, he also works on the Google Brain deep learning AI team.
Dr. Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal
Along with Hinton, Dr. Bengio is referred to as one of the “Godfathers of AI” and “Godfathers of Deep Learning.” He currently teaches in the Université de Montréal’s Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, and is scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
Leaders Shaping Young Tech Minds
With tech pioneers and world-renowned experts across Canada’s universities and colleges molding young tech minds, the future of Canadian tech talent is promising.
2. Canada has some of the largest, fastest-growing tech hubs in the world
Other Canadian cities are emerging as hotbeds of talent, too. Vancouver saw the most significant year-over-year gains with 36% growth in tech jobs. Ottawa ties with the SF Bay Area for North America's tech talent concentration at 10%, three times the Canadian average.
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The growth is not just concentrated in big cities. Hamilton and Waterloo are two of the fastest-growing “opportunity markets” in North America, with 52% and 47% growth in tech job creation.
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Notably, Waterloo is making a splash in the Canadian tech space with prominent players like Google, Shopify, and unicorn companies like ApplyBoard establishing hubs in the area to attract new grads fresh on the scene.
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Waterloo’s ecosystem is slowly becoming one-of-a-kind, with Canada’s top innovation hub (Communitech), Canada’s #1 private business accelerator (The Accelerator Centre), and Canada’s most productive incubator (Velocity) working together to bolster the local tech community.
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Toronto alone has introduced over 80,000 new tech jobs since 2010.
Furthermore, it has among the highest concentration of tech talent in North America, with a qualified pool of over 270,000 individuals – and growing.
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Ontario’s capital is Canada’s mecca of education, research, and innovation, with some of the world’s most acclaimed post-secondary incubators. MaRS Discovery District, DMZ at Ryerson, Humber College’s Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation, and OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab are just a few.
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The innovation, growth, and talent originating in Canada’s largest city has attracted tech heavy hitters like Google, Netflix, DoorDash, Uber, Pinterest, Wayfair and others to establish Toronto offices, as well as high-growth startups from the US like VTS and Firework.
3. Canada has a wealth of tech talent from World-leading companies
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It’s becoming much more common for major companies to expand in Canadian markets.
Amazon announcing its plans to expand its Vancouver tech hub with a new office that will bring 3,000 new jobs to the city is a prime example.
In Toronto, big players like Cloudflare, Reddit, and TikTok have been setting up shop in the city and expanding their software engineering teams.
Companies like Salesforce, SAP, Intuit, Oracle, and Uber have also expanded in Canada, and big players like Hootsuite, Shopify, OpenText, Telus, and Constellation software have always called Canada home.
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Aside from enterprises, many startups are also choosing to scale in Canada, like Wealthsimple, KOHO, Viral Nation, Apollo Insurance, and ApplyBoard being excellent examples.
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There is a considerable footprint of companies you can recruit from in Canada, and there’s no shortage of talent.
4. Experienced Partners Can Help You Expand In The Canadian Tech Market
At DevTalent, we scale high-performing software development teams from a software engineer’s perspective. We’re software engineers recruiting software engineers.
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Our team has recruited, developed, and retained teams for many US venture-backed startups based in New York, the Bay Area, and across the country. We are experts in fine-tuning engineering teams with the right mix of talent, processes, and tools to ensure optimal velocity, code quality, and long-term sustainability.
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If Canada has been on your radar, we can help you enter the market. We focus exclusively on recruiting for technical roles, with decades of experience recruiting software engineers in Toronto, Vancouver, and major Canadian tech hubs for companies across North America.
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If you’re ready to get started scaling your software engineering team in Canada, get in touch here.
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