> we're very happy with international engineers but if you come to me asking for a US engineer comp, it takes away the primary reason why we'd consider international in the first place

So engineers outside the US are fine if you can get them at a steep discount compared to their American counterparts? This sounded quite appealing until this line. Now I feel like the company is overly stingy. In the future you may want to leave this line out and simply tailor offers to the candidates when the time comes.