English for IT Teams in Serbia: Belgrade, Novi Sad and the Distributed Tech Scene

Serbia turned into one of Europe's busier tech locations over the last few years. Belgrade and Novi Sad lead it, Niš and Čačak are catching up, and the companies working here range from local product firms to international names like Schneider Electric and Vega IT, plus a steady stream of teams that moved in from elsewhere and kept their existing clients. Most of this work happens in English, and that’s where a lot of otherwise strong engineers run into a wall.

The wall isn’t grammar. It’s the specific situations the work runs on: a stand-up update that lands without a follow-up question, a bug report a colleague abroad can act on, a client call where a technical decision has to make sense to a non-technical listener. That’s the English we train at UnifyHub, and this page is about how it works for teams based in Serbia.

Serbia attracted over 305 million US dollars in startup investment between 2017 and 2025, and Belgrade dominates the ecosystem, followed by Novi Sad and Niš. Science and Technology Parks are running in Belgrade, Niš and Novi Sad, with more being built. Novi Sad now matches Belgrade closely on company count, and even smaller cities like Čačak host real software firms.

For day-to-day work this means two things. First, a large share of Serbian IT companies serve clients abroad, so English is the working language whether or not the team sits in one city. Second, the talent pool mixes local engineers with people who relocated to Serbia and brought international teams with them. A single company often has both, working together, in English.

For an engineer in Belgrade or Novi Sad working with a distributed team, English shows up in a handful of recurring moments, and each one is its own skill.

Stand-ups reward saying what you did, what you’re blocked on and what’s at risk in under thirty seconds, clearly enough that nobody has to ask a clarifying question. Bug reports and Jira tickets have to be readable by a colleague in another country who can’t walk over to your desk, which puts a lot of weight on precise wording. Sprint retrospectives ask people to raise a problem and suggest a fix without it sounding like an accusation, which is hard in any second language. Client calls, common in Serbia’s outsourcing-heavy market, ask engineers to explain a technical choice to someone who doesn’t share their background.

None of this is covered by a general business English course built around emails and meeting etiquette. The English that matters for a Serbian tech team is the English of the daily workflow.

We set training by role, because a QA engineer and a DevOps engineer spend their English very differently.

Software engineers work on stand-ups, code review comments, architecture discussions and client calls. QA engineers live in bug reports, test discussions and retrospectives, plus the awkward moment of telling a developer something is broken. DevOps engineers handle the highest-pressure case: incident updates, postmortems and on-call handoffs, often under time pressure. Product and engineering managers spend their day aligning people across functions and time zones. We train each on the conversations they actually have.

Lessons are online, so a team split between Belgrade, Novi Sad and a few people abroad joins the same session. We teach in small groups of two to four, which works well for practising real situations like a mock retrospective or a triage call, and one-to-one when someone wants focused work on their own gaps. Teachers are certified international instructors. Managers get a monthly progress report with CEFR benchmarks, so improvement is visible rather than assumed.

UnifyHub is based in Estonia and works with IT teams across Europe. Serbia is one of our main markets, alongside Cyprus, Georgia and Armenia. For the wider picture of how we train remote and distributed teams, see our guide to English for remote IT teams in Europe.

After a few months, the teams we work with tend to write clearer tickets, run quicker stand-ups, and speak up more readily in meetings and client calls. For a company serving international clients from Serbia, that’s the difference between a team that can do the work and a team that can also be trusted in front of the customer.