By the end of June I'd been job-hunting for three months. The numbers weren't great. I'd sent 64 applications through job boards and LinkedIn Easy Apply, and I'd heard back from three. Two rejected me at the résumé stage. The third moved me to a recruiter screen and then went silent for six weeks. I was a backend engineer at a small fintech, but the team had shrunk twice in the previous year and I'd stopped learning anything new. The plan was to land somewhere serious about payments specifically. The problem was that every application I sent looked like every other one sitting in the same inbox. My CV was the same CV everyone else had. My cover letters were rephrased versions of the JD. The breakthrough wasn't a tactic. It was a person. A friend I'd worked with two companies ago had joined GoCardless eight months earlier on the payments team. We had drinks. I described what I was after, somewhere serious about payments infrastructure, not too big, with engineers who weren't allergic to writing about how the system worked. He asked a few questions about my recent work on idempotency keys and then said he could pass my CV straight to the hiring manager. The recruiter call landed two days later. Thirty minutes, mostly logistics: ↓
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