How to Get a Job at a US Tech Company

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2018, and the visa sections have been rewritten and updated to reflect the situation as of October 2026. It reflects personal experience, not legal advice. For an actual application, consult an immigration attorney and rely on the latest official rules.

Since I started this blog, many readers have asked me how to work in the US, especially at tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, Netflix, Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. After answering a few times, I wanted to share it all in one post.

When I wrote this post in 2018, getting an H-1B work visa as a foreign national was already hard. As of 2026, it is still hard, and more complicated. Companies compete for 85,000 H-1B slots a year (65,000 regular slots, plus 20,000 reserved for holders of US master’s degrees or higher). The biggest change is how selection works. It used to be a purely random lottery. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a final rule in December 2025 that took effect in February 2026, and starting with the FY2027 season, selection is wage-weighted: based on the wage level the employer offers, a Level I registration gets 1 entry, Level II gets 2, Level III gets 3, and Level IV gets 4. The separate master’s cap pool still exists. In the model DHS used when writing the rule, the estimated selection rate was only about 15 percent for Level I and about 61 percent for Level IV (these are estimates, not actual results). Also, registering the same beneficiary through multiple employers no longer improves the odds, and the lowest wage level among the registrations is the one that counts. In short, the H-1B is no longer a pure game of luck. The higher the wage level, the better the odds, and for new graduates whose starting salaries mostly land at Level I, this path is narrower than it used to be.

The other big change in 2025 was a fee. In September 2025, the US government announced a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, and it was briefly in effect. In 2026, courts blocked it: a federal court in Massachusetts vacated it and a California court issued an injunction, though a court in Washington, D.C. ruled the fee lawful. The courts are split, appeals are pending, and a later announcement extending the fee through September 2027 was blocked by injunction as well, so the fee is not currently being collected. (Separately, in August 2026 DHS proposed collecting a fee of about $103,265 through rulemaking instead; that proposal is not in effect.) Its scope also mainly targeted people petitioning from outside the US; if you are studying in the US and changing status from an F-1 student visa to an H-1B, you were not its target. The bottom line is that the H-1B system has been changing fast. The visa information in this post reflects October 2026, so before you start planning in earnest, check the latest official rules again.

If you have US citizenship or a green card, congratulations, finding a job is already much easier for you than for a foreign national. If you already have US work authorization, you can follow my earlier job hunting series:

Basically, polish your LinkedIn profile, ask friends who already work at tech companies to refer you, and apply through LinkedIn. That is the more efficient way to job hunt.

If you do not have US work authorization, you need a company to sponsor a work visa for you. The first route, and probably the most reliable one, is to study in the US and job hunt on OPT after graduating. For STEM majors, on top of the basic one year of OPT, you can extend by 2 more years, up to 36 months. During those 3 years on OPT, you get multiple chances at the H-1B selection and time for the company to start your green card process, which makes it the safer route with the best odds of staying and working in the US.

(2026 update: In October 2026, DHS also put forward a proposal under which schools would pay a $70,000 fee for each F-1 student they recommend for OPT. This is only a proposal. It has not taken effect, it is still in the public comment period, and whether it passes at all is undecided. I am flagging it here because it shows the direction of travel: OPT policy is tightening, so factor policy risk into any study-abroad plan.)

Another group of people works at the overseas branch of a multinational company for a year (to be precise, the L-1 requires that within the three years before applying, you worked continuously for at least one year at a related company abroad, in a managerial or executive role, or in a role requiring specialized knowledge). Then, when the US office has an opening, they come to the US on an L-1 visa. I know many engineers at Yahoo Taiwan who came to the US exactly this way.

If you are already working and do not want another degree, you can also look directly for companies willing to sponsor an H-1B. The process now starts with an electronic registration each March (the registration fee is $215 per beneficiary), and only selected registrations move on to a full petition. Because of that, big companies usually start interviewing engineers abroad months in advance, so if you want to make the next registration season, your interviews need to start around now. There is one practical trap under the new system: the wage level, job classification (SOC code), and work location declared at registration must match the full petition filed after selection. If a company registers you at a higher wage level to get more entries and then files the petition at a lower level, the petition can be denied or revoked, so the registration has to be honest from the start. And if you land the job but are not selected for the H-1B, large tech companies usually have many overseas offices, such as London in the UK and Vancouver in Canada. Employees who cannot get a US work visa are often placed at another office for a year and transferred back to the US afterward.

Another question I often get: does my English have to be great to work in the US, and should I improve my English before I start interviewing? I think your English only needs to be good enough to communicate at work and in daily life. As the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad once put it when asked about improving English: is a New York beggar’s English worse than yours? What matters most is that your professional skills are strong. English is just a communication tool, and once you are past the bar, nobody minds.

US tech company culture today is fairly open and energetic. Talented people from all over the world compete here, you see a lot of innovation, and you experience systematic ways of getting things done. Pay and benefits are also quite good. If all you want is the highest salary, Silicon Valley may not be the ideal region. See my earlier post, 2017 Global Tech Salary Trends (its finding that Austin, Seattle, and Denver beat Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area on cost-adjusted salary comes from that 2017 analysis and reflects the data of the time). Of course, Silicon Valley is still home to the headquarters of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, and the sheer number of jobs here far exceeds other regions. And if you do not land an offer from your ideal company right away, working in Silicon Valley for a year or two and then interviewing elsewhere is very common.

I wish everyone who wants to work in the US the best of luck!

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on October 6, 2018. The blog is now offline, and the text is preserved in a Wayback Machine backup. It has been lightly edited for this site, and the visa sections were rewritten to reflect the rules as of 2026.