Switzerland

Feeny is tracking about 472 open tech roles in Switzerland, from roughly 102 companies hiring. Each listing comes from a company's own careers page, so it's a live opening rather than a stale repost. Zurich carries most of the volume, with Lausanne adding a smaller pool on the French-speaking side. Filter by discipline to narrow it down.

Zurich is the primary hub, home to a large Google R&D center and the strongest concentration of deep-tech roles. Lausanne is the secondary one, anchored by EPFL on the French-speaking side of the country. Zug, just south of Zurich, punches above its size as the base of Crypto Valley. Across the 2 Swiss cities we index, Zurich is where most of the search will point.

Google runs one of its largest engineering centers outside the US in Zurich, which is a major draw on its own. The universities feed the rest: ETH Zurich and EPFL send strong engineers into deep-tech and developer-tools companies. Down in Zug, Crypto Valley anchors a cluster of blockchain firms. Feeny lists roles from about 102 companies nationwide, so the live set is worth checking directly.

The mix leans deep tech, developer tools, privacy, and blockchain. ETH Zurich and EPFL produce engineers who fill research-heavy and systems roles, and Google's presence adds serious backend and infrastructure work. Zug's Crypto Valley drives blockchain and cryptography hiring. It's a market that rewards strong fundamentals over flashy product work, and the pay reflects it, sitting among the highest in the world.

Switzerland pays as well as anywhere on earth, and the engineering bar, set by ETH and EPFL, is genuinely high. The country runs on precision, and the work tends to match. The obvious catch is cost: Zurich and Geneva are among the most expensive cities in the world, so a large salary doesn't stretch the way the number suggests. The honest trade is that you earn a lot and spend a lot, and the standard of living is very high if you can crack into the market.

This is where Switzerland is harder than most of Europe. It isn't in the EU, so it uses quotas for non-EU and non-EFTA workers, which makes hiring from outside Europe more competitive and less certain than a Blue Card process elsewhere. EU and EFTA citizens, by contrast, move freely and have a much easier path. It's worth being honest that if you're not European, Switzerland is a tougher market to break into than Germany or the Netherlands, even with the strong pay on offer.