Finding an Engineering Manager role in Singapore took me about 14 weeks from the first application to a signed offer, and it was harder than I expected.
I sent 38 applications in total, mostly through job boards and company career pages in the early weeks, but the replies were irregular and the timelines were long. The Singapore market for EM roles was tighter than I expected. Most jobs attracted strong local and regional candidates, and because I was applying from abroad, I had to work harder to stand out. After a few slow weeks I moved my effort to meeting people in person. The change came at a regional leadership offsite, where the CTO of a Singapore engineering scale-up was a keynote speaker. His talk was about scaling engineering organisations across Southeast Asia, exactly the problem I had been thinking about, so the conversation afterwards was easy. I did not pitch myself that day. I waited two weeks and then sent him a short document, setting out what I wanted to learn about their organisation structure, their current team problems, and how they thought about the scope of an EM role at their stage of growth. That document got me into the process. Nine rounds followed over several weeks: technical conversations, a ↓