Warsaw Worked from Barcelona Polish in-country regions Same hour as us

Warsaw.
In-country residency.

We are based in Barcelona and share your working day exactly. Two things make Warsaw different from most of the cities we work in: Polish data can now genuinely stay in Poland, which changed what the regulated sector is able to consider at all — and whatever we hand over here will be read line by line by engineers who could have built it themselves.

Last reviewed 5 September 2026 · Engineering guidance, not legal advice.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY DIFFERENT HERE

In-country residency is now real

Poland has its own cloud regions, and that is recent enough that a lot of internal policy has not caught up with it. It matters more here than the same sentence would elsewhere: for years the honest answer to a Polish bank asking whether processing could stay in Poland was no, so the question stopped being asked. It can be asked again. One caveat worth checking before you design around it — provider coverage is not uniform, so confirm that the specific services and models you need are offered in the Polish region of the provider you actually use, rather than assuming a region name covers everything.

UODO, and the supervisor above it

Data protection is supervised by UODO under the standard GDPR, which for us is the same regime we work under from Spain. In financial services, the more consequential constraints usually come from the sector supervisor rather than the data authority: expectations around outsourcing, control over where processing happens, and the ability to audit a provider have shaped Polish banking IT for years and apply to an AI service exactly as they apply to any other. That is why the local region changes the conversation rather than merely shortening the latency.

Polish costs more per word than English

This is an ordinary engineering fact with real consequences. Polish is heavily inflected and, in most current tokenisers, the same text consumes noticeably more tokens than its English equivalent. That moves three things at once: how much of a document fits in a context window, the cost of every call, and how retrieval should be chunked. It also means a benchmark run in English tells you little about what your system will cost in production. We measure on your own Polish material instead — the method is under tokens and context windows.

You are not buying capacity

Warsaw has one of the deepest engineering benches in Europe, and nobody here needs to import general software development. So we assume the opposite posture from the one an agency usually takes: the handover is a code review rather than a demonstration, we expect to be argued with about design choices, and the value we are offering is a specific competence you do not want to hire permanently. If your team could build it in the time available, we will say so.

THE WORK THAT COMES OUT OF THIS CITY

Warsaw enquiries divide between organisations that must keep everything inside a controlled perimeter and organisations that must run enormous back-office volume cheaply. Occasionally both at once.

Banking and insurance. Polish retail banks are technically strong and have built a great deal in-house, so what arrives is rarely a request for a chatbot. It is usually a document or decisioning process where the constraint is that a customer-affecting outcome must be explainable and reconstructable afterwards, and where the data cannot leave a defined boundary. That combination points at open-weight models inside your own infrastructure more often here than anywhere else we work, and the boundary itself is the engineering — which is what secure data pipelines covers.

Business and shared services. The centres in and around the city process invoices, contracts, claims and HR paperwork for the rest of Europe, at volumes where a percentage point of automation is a headcount. These processes are already documented and already measured, which makes them unusually tractable, and the honest work is deciding where the system must hand back to a person rather than pushing the automation rate to a number that looks good in a report. That is the substance of internal operations agents.

Software companies. Product teams here want AI capability inside what they sell, evaluated properly, at a cost per user they can defend. The conversation starts at evaluation and architecture rather than at feasibility, which is a pleasant change.

Logistics. Poland sits on the road freight corridor between western Europe and the east, and the paperwork that comes with it is multilingual, high volume and full of exceptions. The pattern is much as it is in any freight-heavy city, described under the logistics document pipeline, with the added detail that a single consignment file here may contain three or four languages.

HOW A WARSAW PROJECT ACTUALLY RUNS

We fly out for discovery

Barcelona to Warsaw is around three hours direct. The first workshop is worth doing in a room, and for a regulated client we want the security and infrastructure people in it on day one rather than as a review gate later, because in this city they will materially change the design and they will be right to.

Then remote, on identical hours

Poland and Spain share a clock all year, so a question raised at 09:00 is answered that morning and the working day ends together. We work in English; that has never been the constraint here.

And handover as a review, not a demo

The final sessions are structured as your engineers reading and challenging the system — the evaluation set, the failure cases, the prompts, the retrieval logic, the cost model — rather than watching it work. It is a harder meeting and a much better one. After it the system is yours, in your repositories and your infrastructure, and you should not need us to change it.

QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS — 5

No. We have one office and it is in Barcelona. We travel to Warsaw for discovery, for handover and for anything where being in the room changes the outcome. There is no Polish entity, no local partner and nobody here representing us.

More often than it used to be, yes. There are Polish cloud regions now, and open-weight models can be self-hosted on infrastructure you already control, including with no external network path at all. The thing to verify before designing around it is that the particular services and hosted models you need are available in the Polish region of your provider, because coverage differs. Where a hosted model is used we document its retention and training terms at the time of writing, and you should confirm them against the provider's current terms.

Often you should, and we would rather say that than win the work. Warsaw has excellent engineers and if the problem is ordinary software, local hiring is cheaper and better. Where we are worth the flight is a narrow band: you need a system of a kind your team has not built before, you need it now, and you do not want to carry the specialism permanently once it is running. That is why the engagement ends with your people owning the code rather than with a retainer.

It has to be proven rather than assumed, and Polish is a genuinely harder case than English or Spanish — inflection, diacritics, and the fact that most models have seen far less of it. We evaluate candidate models on your own Polish material with your own people scoring the output before anything is chosen, and the evaluation stays running afterwards so a model update cannot quietly degrade it. Where the honest answer is that quality is not sufficient for an unsupervised path, we will design a supervised one instead.

The same as anywhere else — the ranges are on the pricing page, in euros and exclusive of VAT. We do not price by postcode, in either direction: we do not add for a western European address and we do not discount to compete with a local day rate.

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