Engineering Manager at a Singapore scale-up: 14 weeks and 9 rounds

Finding a Singapore-based Engineering Manager role took me about 14 weeks from first application to signed offer, and it was more of a grind than I'd anticipated. I sent out 38 applications in total, leaning heavily on job boards and company career pages in the early weeks, but the responses were inconsistent and the timelines stretched long. Singapore's market for EM roles felt tighter than I'd expected. Most postings drew strong local and regional candidates, and as someone considering relocation, I had to work harder to stand out. After a few weeks of slow traction, I shifted my energy toward in-person networking. That was the move that actually mattered. The break came when I attended a regional leadership offsite where the CTO of a Singapore engineering scale-up was a keynote speaker. His talk was about scaling engineering organizations across Southeast Asia, exactly the problem space I'd been thinking about, so the conversation afterward felt natural rather than forced. I didn't pitch myself that day. Instead I waited two weeks, then followed up with a short document outlining what I'd genuinely want to learn about their org structure, their current team challenges, and how they thought about EM scope at their stage of ↓