Novi Sad & London

Two cities, one working day

The core of this team is from Novi Sad, Serbia - a city you may never have visited, and might struggle to place on a map. We lead from London now, but much of the engineering still happens on home ground. The short version: the clocks nearly match, and the culture actually does.

  • One hour ahead of the UK
  • A full working day of overlap
  • The core team in London
Why it works

London hours, without the distance

Working across time zones usually fails in one specific place: the clock. A question asked mid-afternoon lands in someone’s tomorrow, the answer arrives while you sleep, and a five-minute conversation stretches across two days. Nobody is at fault. Everything is slower.

That’s the problem Novi Sad doesn’t have. Serbia runs one hour ahead of the UK — your 9-to-5 is our 10-to-6 — so the day overlaps from your first coffee to your last call. Stand-ups happen live. Reviews get talked through instead of queued. A quick question stays quick.

The rest is culture, and the gap is smaller than the map implies. Meetings run on habits you’ll recognise — the same directness, the same sense of what a deadline means — and English here is the working language of the industry, not an accommodation laid on for clients. The distance tends to stop registering somewhere in the first week.

What that means for you

Real-time collaboration
through your entire working day
Answers within the hour
not the next morning
Near-native English
on every call and in every pull request
A shared European rhythm
workdays and holidays that mostly line up
Close enough to fly over
and meet in person when it matters

One hour ahead

Novi Sad runs on Central European Time, so an early stand-up and an end-of-day call both land inside a normal working day - yours and ours. Nobody dials in at midnight to make this work.

A culture you recognise

European business norms, football at the weekend and coffee that takes its time. Meetings feel familiar from the first call.

Easy to reach

Direct flights connect London and Belgrade in under three hours, with Novi Sad a short drive on. We come to you for discovery, workshops and the weeks where being in the room matters - and you have a standing invitation to come here.

Every July

Exit takes over the fortress

For a few nights each July, Petrovaradin Fortress — the citadel in the photographs above — fills with stages and becomes Exit, one of the biggest music festivals in Europe. It began as a student movement and has been voted the continent’s best more than once.

It’s a fair shorthand for the city: outward-looking, good at hosting, tuned to the same music and the same weekends you know from home. The other fifty-one weeks, the fortress goes back to being the best place in town to watch the Danube go by.

Est. 2000
born as a student movement, now a European institution
200k+
festival-goers descend on the fortress each July
40+
countries in the crowd - the UK well among them
In the UK

The relationship lives in London

The reasonable worry about a team abroad isn’t the work — it’s the day something urgent lands and everyone who can help is a country away. The London half of this setup exists for exactly that day.

The core of the team lives here — senior engineers who keep London hours, lead the engagement and write code on your project, not account managers relaying messages. It’s the arrangement we’d want in your position: the engineering shared across both cities, the accountability kept where you are.

Your UK point of contact

The core team, based here - hands-on in the work and accountable for the relationship.

  • Senior engineers, hands-on in your build - not account managers
  • A UK phone number and email - no international dialling
  • On hand for in-person meetings and workshops
  • Know the state of your work first-hand, in your working hours

Curious how a Novi Sad team would work for you?

Book a free consultation. We’ll introduce your UK point of contact and talk through how we’d run your day-to-day. And if you’d rather start by seeing the city and meeting the engineers, say so - visits are easy to arrange.

Book a consultation