As the founder of Junction, I spend a lot of time in interviews. And in those interviews, one thing comes up over and over: "why are you hiring engineers in Europe when most of your customers are in the US?" We make our money in America - our customers are American labs, clinicians, and developers. So why do we believe GMT is the best timezone in the world in which to grow our engineering team?
It started with people
Our first hires were engineers we already trusted, and they happened to be in GMT. We weren't chasing a location strategy, we were chasing talent we already believed in. But once we started building a GMT presence, we found something we didn't expect: it worked really well.
Naivety is a product advantage
US engineering candidates often come pre-loaded with assumptions about how healthcare software "has to" work: legacy EHR patterns, established data models, "the way it's always been done." Our GMT engineers don't carry that baggage. They ask "why" more often, and they're not afraid to propose an architecture that breaks from convention if it's better. That naivety, that willingness to not assume the old way is the only way, has been one of our biggest unlock for building genuinely new infrastructure rather than incrementally improving on old patterns.
GMT cities punch above their weight
London, Lisbon, and other GMT hubs have deep talent pools, strong engineering culture, and increasingly, healthtech-specific expertise as more companies build distributed teams here. We get access to senior engineers who'd be competing against every FAANG company for attention in the Bay Area, but who are excited to do foundational work at a startup when based in a GMT hub. We're not GMT because it's convenient. We're GMT because it's where we've found some of the best builders for the problem we're solving, and because operating across the Atlantic has forced us to build better processes, clearer documentation, and stronger async communication habits than we would have if everyone sat in the same room. Betting hard on GMT was never a compromise. It's been a genuine advantage.