A DevOps Engineer

Our firm was retained by a multinational software group to transfer one of its senior engineers to the United States as an intracompany transferee with specialized knowledge. The petition was approved in premium processing without a request for evidence.

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L-1B is a challenging category, and this case carried three risk factors. The role is one adjudicators routinely dismiss as one that can be performed by many engineers using publicly available tools. The petitioner was small, with a handful of U.S. employees, and relatively new. And the engineer's work served a single outside client, which raises the offsite-placement rules that have sunk many L-1B filings.

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We addressed each challenge in the petition. On specialized knowledge, we provided extensive documentation showing the uniqueness of the platforms the engineer works with and built two charts: one breaking his duties into percentages of time, mapping the custom-built systems and internal architecture each duty required; the other taking every claimed skill and stating how he acquired it and where he had applied it. That let us show the officer that the knowledge lived in proprietary platforms nobody outside the organization can see, not in the generic technologies, and that acquiring it takes at least year inside the company on top of years of senior experience. On the corporate side, we proved the affiliate relationship through common ownership and documented both entities actively doing business with tax returns, financials, leases, payroll, bank records. On placement, we documented that the control over the engineer’s work, including the assignment, supervision, and performance review, remained with the petitioner.