I think it is quite common for east coast companies to hire European remote workers. I work in a Java team comprised of 7 people currently for a US Boston based company and 6 of the 7 are based in the EU (2 in UK,2 in Spain, 2 in Czech Republic).

There are certain barriers to hiring but it allows you to pick some really great engineers up that would just be impossible to do in San Fran etc without a huge budget.