It would seem that we already know everything. Where to look for teams. How to sign NDAs. What KPIs there are. But here you are sitting — CTO, or someone next to you — and you are flipping through a vulnerability report. It looks like there are backups. And the firewalls are not Chinese. But inside, it feels like you’re not quite in control of the game.
And then someone whispers over coffee, “Are you sure you have a partner and not a vendor of delayed problems?”
And it starts — not checking, but self-disassembling. Because outsourcing is not just a contract. It is an act of trust in an unpredictable world.
And in Eastern Europe, especially on the line between Ukraine and Romania, it takes on a slightly different flavor. Among the kind of developers Romania, this is no longer exotic, but a familiar environment where sustainability isn’t declared — it’s designed. From scratch. For survival
What can go wrong?
Politics, economics, infrastructure, culture, people’s availability, IP laws — you can read it all in the analytics. But, honestly, no checklist will tell you how a CTO feels when his extension is on hold for the third hour and calls are answered by a script.
- Ukraine? The risks are known. But the stability is impressive. Who else deplots from a generator, under sirens and cyberattacks?
- Romania? Calmer. But it’s still Europe. It’s still close. It’s still rough.
Table. Simple and to the point
| Parameter | Ukraine | Romania |
| Geopolitical stability | Low but highly adaptable | Average, with internal stability |
| Digital resilience level | High: habit of working under pressure | High: Strong systems engineering |
| English in teams | Often fluent, but local accents | Widespread, higher understanding of context |
| Working with infrastructure | Flexible, adaptive, sometimes chaotic | Standardized, scalable |
| Cultural synchronization | Often coincides in values | Closer to the Western model of responsibility |
Risk #1: Geopolitics
War. Sanctions. Cyber campaigns. Market stability.
Yes, it sounds like the introduction to an intelligence report. But that’s your reality if you’re building a business on distributed teams.
- In Ukraine, it’s amazing resilience. Systems don’t just don’t fall down. They evolve. Those who have worked with teams like N-iX know that when everything around them is unstable, it is architecture and the habit of discipline that saves the day.
- In Romania, it’s the cultural proximity and availability of developers who’ve grown up building real products — not just coding exercises. Among software engineers in Romania, it’s almost a code of honor — not just to write, but to envision. Not just to execute, but to take over if something goes wrong.
But let’s be honest: there is no “safe zone”. There are zones with different risk architectures.
Which means you need to plan not for the “if” but for the “when.”
“We chose two vendors: one in Kyiv, one in Cluj-Napoca. Six months later, the crisis came — but it was not the one with more resources who survived. It was the one who had the habit of replicating responsibility.” — VP of Engineering, a Chicago-based MarTech company.
Risk #2: Losing control
You put your trust in. And then — what? No access to the source code. Decision logic is unclear. One key engineer quits — and that’s it, you’re dependent.
IP protection? That’s not a legal point. It’s a cultural norm.
In Romania, for example, the product approach is embedded in the mindset — the kind of developers shaped by Romania’s engineering culture tend to work “as owners”, not just as coders.
In Ukraine, it is often the other way around: they take on more than they demand. Because otherwise they cannot stay alive.
What to do? At least three things:
- Do split infrastructure. Have critical elements duplicated in your loop.
- Write out emergency scenarios in documentation, not on your knees.
- Allocate key roles between in-house and external.
In short, don’t wait for disaster, but describe how you will live through it.
Yes, it sounds like extra work. But when disaster strikes, it’s the only one left.
Risk #3: Mental discrepancies
Here you are discussing cloud migration. For yourself, you see it as a step towards autonomy. For the team, they see it as a reason to renew your contract. Or you think that “everyone has CI/CD”, but it turns out that Jenkins is configured by a student.
- Romania has a strong school of systems engineering.
- Ukraine has a culture of urgent response. Both are valuable.
But if you haven’t discussed values up front — the architecture cracks as soon as priorities change.
“We didn’t synchronize expectations. We thought we needed the same things. But the Romanians were building reliability and we were building speed. The conflict wasn’t in the code, it was in the goals.” — Co-founder, Series A startup from New York City.
On reliability as a mindset
Sometimes it seems: well, since Romania is in the EU and Ukraine is at the front, the conclusion is obvious.
But reliability is not about a passport. It’s about the habit of thinking two steps ahead.
Romanians build like engineers. Slowly, sometimes boring — but for years.
Ukrainians are like firemen. Fast, sometimes unstable — but with intuition.
The choice between them is not “better” or “worse”. It’s “at what stage is your product” and “what scares you more: a slow start or an abrupt failure”.
Habits that save the day
- Don’t sign a contract until you’ve gone through “pre-project diagnostic” sessions.
- Have each external engineer have a shadow inside your team.
- Plan a plan B — and show it to your partner. If he or she is intimidated, it’s not the partner.
- Talk about more than just technology. Talk about responsibility. Who’s responsible for what when it’s already on fire?
N-iX companies have long built such transparency into their processes: they have checklists in case of blackout, plan B with ciphers that not only DevOps but also PMs understand.
Conclusion
You can choose the US, Poland, India, whoever.
But if you’re thinking about Eastern Europe — think not about the risks, but about how teams there know how to live with them. Especially those developers who came out of Romania’s real-world startup trenches — the ones who know firsthand what it means to build under pressure. There are those who project not for “all is well” but for “what if tomorrow”. This is not fear. This is engineering maturity. These are the ones who most often stay in place when others turn off Zoom.
Risks are not a bug. They’re a feature of the world. The question isn’t whether they’ll go away. The question is who you’ll live them with.
