Security Engineer at a Singapore fintech: comp band beat the equivalent role in London

A friend recommended me. I wouldn't have gotten through the front door otherwise. I'd been a security engineer at a London fintech for four years and had been thinking about leaving for two of them. The role had a clear ceiling, and there was no room to move sideways into application security, where I wanted to spend more time. I'd also been quietly homesick for Singapore, where I grew up, and had been talking with my partner about whether moving back made sense. A close friend from university had joined a Singapore fintech as the platform lead the previous year. He'd told me, more than once, that I should apply if a role opened up. I hadn't, mostly because I'd been waiting for a moment when the move felt right. The moment arrived in spring. Two friends in London moved away within the same month and I ran out of reasons to stay. I told the friend. He passed my CV directly to the security team's hiring manager. The recruiter screen happened the same week. The process was five rounds across three weeks. It was the most thorough interview process I've ever been through. Round one was an application security round. Two engineers gave me a real piece of their codebase, a payment authorisation flow, and asked me to identify three ↓