Full-stack Developer at a US software company: cold email pitching a LATAM expansion role

I'd been watching a US software company for a few months before I made my move. They were clearly building toward Latin America. Blog posts hinted at regional plans, a couple of Spanish-language social posts felt like they were testing the waters, and the job board listed nothing in the region yet. So rather than wait for a posting that might never come, I spent a weekend writing a one-page pitch aimed straight at their CEO. My argument was that expanding into LATAM without a Spanish-fluent full-stack developer embedded in the timezone was a real execution risk, and that I was the person to close that gap. I kept it tight, specific to their product, and sent it cold on a Tuesday morning. He replied the same day, and we had a call scheduled within 48 hours. That response time told me the timing had landed. What followed was four rounds of interviews over about a month, in a format unlike anything I'd done before. The founder runs an async-first organization, so there were no synchronous technical interviews at all. Instead I recorded Loom walkthroughs of my approach to two architecture problems and submitted written exercises that had me think through a localization strategy for one of their core features. It was slower and more ↓