After about six weeks of quietly looking, I'd sent out roughly fifteen applications across Sydney's tech sector before the right break came through.
A former client, someone I'd worked closely with on an integration project a couple of years back, got in touch unprompted and said he'd put my name forward to the Solutions Engineering manager at a Sydney B2B SaaS company. I hadn't given them a serious look before that conversation, but the hybrid setup and the scope of the role made it worth having a crack at. The process ran over six rounds across about forty-five days, and I won't pretend the pacing didn't wear on me. The early stages were standard: an initial screen with HR, a technical discovery call, then a deeper architecture whiteboard session where I had to walk through a multi-tenant cloud migration scenario with two senior engineers pushing back on my assumptions. I felt confident enough after those. But round five was a panel with cross-functional stakeholders, and the tone shifted. They were assessing how I'd handle internal politics as much as technical complexity. Round six was the one that mattered. A sixty-minute mock customer demo, except their actual sales team was in the room, watching in silence. About fifteen ↓