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Over about five months I applied to roughly 50 positions, almost all through LinkedIn, with a handful via Glassdoor. No networking events, no warm introductions, no carefully crafted cover letters. Just a well-put-together profile, a clean CV, and a lot of scrolling through job alerts on Sunday evenings. I'd always assumed that breaking into a better-paid in-house Legal Counsel role would mean knowing someone on the inside, or at least having a former colleague put in a word.
The process took around 150 days from first application to accepted offer, which felt like an age at the time. There were weeks where nothing moved at all, and I wondered whether I was pitching myself at the right level or aiming at the right sectors. Out of 50 applications I got three interviews, which sounds like a low conversion rate, but each one was for a role I'd read carefully and felt I could do well. I didn't spray applications around. I made sure my experience matched the specifics in the listing before I applied. Everything clicked in the third interview process. The role was hybrid, based in the UK, and came with a salary of £60,000, a meaningful step up from where I'd been. There were also travel perks built into the position that I hadn't even thought to look for when I started. I signed.
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 take-home exercise on organisation design, a values interview with the founder that went deeper than I expected, and a few calls with senior engineers I would possibly manage.
The final package was US$165,000. The base is a little below what comparable EM roles in the US were paying at that time, but the company added expat health insurance and paid my relocation to Singapore, which made the whole picture work. After 102 days and 9 rounds of interviews, I said yes.
I was a PhD candidate in statistics in Manchester. I'd been working on my thesis for about two years when I decided I needed to find commercial work. Partly because the funding situation had changed, partly because I'd realised, late, that I wanted to leave academia.
I had no commercial experience. I had three published papers, one of which had been cited fifty times in a small sub-field. I'd taught two undergraduate modules. I'd built a small simulation framework in R that nobody other than me used. The CV looked like a CV for a postdoc, not for a junior data scientist.
Cold emailing hadn't worked when I'd tried it for a week. I'd sent twelve emails to data teams in Manchester and London and got one polite reply.
The thing that worked was a public dashboard. I'd been wanting to learn dbt and Streamlit. I picked a topic, UK retail footfall, using publicly available data from one of the data trusts, and built a dashboard over six weekends. It wasn't elegant. It worked. I put it on a free Streamlit hosting tier and tweeted about it once.
About two months later the head of analytics at a mid-sized retailer in Manchester found the dashboard via a Google search while researching a specific footfall topic. He didn't contact me through the dashboard. He searched for my name, found my LinkedIn, and sent me a message asking if I was open to a junior data scientist role.
The interview process was three rounds over five weeks.
Round one was a technical screen with two senior analysts. They gave me a piece of their data, a retail transaction dataset, and four questions. I had a week. I sent back a six-page Jupyter notebook with the answers, three caveats, and a writeup. They'd been hoping for code rather than narrative. I gave them both.
Round two was a case study presentation. The brief was to take one of the answers from the take-home and turn it into a fifteen-minute presentation for a non-technical stakeholder. I rebuilt one section from scratch, simplified the visualisations, and presented to a panel of five: three analysts, the head of analytics, one product manager. The questions afterwards were about what I'd cut and why.
Round three was a team chat with three other junior data scientists who'd be my peers. Less of an interview, more of an "is this person tolerable to work with" check.
The offer was £25,000 base, the higher end of the junior band. I asked for £28,000, citing the four months of search, the depth of the process, and a slightly higher quote I'd received from a competing offer. They came back at £28,000.
I said yes. I'd sent five formal applications in total.
The recruiter ping came on a Thursday afternoon. By Tuesday I was on a call with the founders.
I'd been at my previous company for four years. I wasn't actively looking. My LinkedIn was up to date because that's just hygiene. About a hundred recruiter messages a year hit my inbox. Ninety-five I ignored, four got a polite "not right now", one sometimes turned into a real conversation.
The opening message was four sentences. It named the company, the team, the specific PM problem they were trying to solve, and a line about why my background looked like a fit. No platitudes, no asking for a phone number, no asking me to update my résumé. The link went to a brief written description of the role and a salary band wide enough to include where I actually was.
I replied that day, asking for fifteen minutes to talk about scope. The recruiter was prompt and direct. The job was Senior PM on a payments-adjacent product at a Series B scale-up. Reporting to the head of product. Real ownership of a roadmap. The company had funding through 2027 in the bank.
The first interview was with the founder, on a Friday. He'd read my resume, looked up two of the projects on my profile, and read a blog post I'd written four years earlier. The questions were specific. By the end of the call I had a clear sense of what the role was, what the next quarter looked like, what the next year looked like, and what success at the six-month mark would look like.
The next round was a portfolio review with the head of product and one of the senior engineers. I walked through three projects. They cared less about the outcome and more about how I'd made the calls along the way: which trade-offs I'd flagged early, which I'd missed, what I'd done when a forecast was wrong.
The big round was the strategy doc. They handed me a three-page brief on a real product area and asked for a six-page response in a week: what I'd prioritize in the first 90 days, what I'd cut, what I'd defer, what I'd want to see in two metrics dashboards on day one. I spent two evenings on it. The six pages became eight, and then I cut it back to six.
The presentation was forty-five minutes with the two founders, the head of product, and a board member. They pushed hard on the first three priorities. The last twenty minutes was them walking through their own version of the brief and asking where mine differed and why.
The offer was $US 118,000 base plus refresh. I asked for the equity refresh up-front and another $10,000 on the base, citing the scope the founder had described. They came back with $128,000 and the refresh I'd asked for. The verbal offer was Friday. The signed papers were Tuesday. I was on the team three weeks later.
I had been working as a freelance brand designer in Buenos Aires for two years. The work was not stable. Some months were good. Some were not. I had been thinking about going back to work inside a studio, for the routine and for the team, but most of the studios I liked were in São Paulo, or they paid in pesos at rates that were too low for me.
One design studio in Buenos Aires was different. They were small, six people, and they paid in USD through Deel because most of their clients were in the US. On their public Instagram they posted the work they did for one regular client, a health tech company in the US. I had been following them for about a year.
Then I had an idea: maybe they would look at a small spec project. I chose their main public client and made three concepts for how I would change the brand. I was honest with myself about it. Nobody had asked for my opinion, so I decided to send it as a piece of work, not as a job application.
I sent a DM to the founder. The message was three sentences: I had been following their work, I had made three versions of a brand refresh for that public client, and did she have ten minutes to look at them? I put one Figma link in the message.
She answered two hours later. She said clearly that my versions were not what they would use, but that this was the kind of work she wanted to buy, and she asked if I was free for one project they needed to give to someone outside. I was.
The project was a brand refresh for a different client. Three weeks of work. The fee was five figures, in USD. I delivered on time. The client approved it with no changes, which does not happen often.
One month later the founder asked if I wanted a longer contract. We agreed on a three-month rolling contract. After two months she asked if I wanted to join full time. The job was permanent, paid in USD through Deel, and I would work inside the team of six instead of continuing as a contractor.
The offer was US$30,000 base. In dollars that number does not look big, but with the exchange rate it works here, and it is better than what I earned on my own. I asked for US$36,000. I explained the work I had already delivered for them, and what it would cost me to change from contractor to employee. They came back at US$36,000.
I said yes. I sent two real applications in the whole search. Both went to job boards and nobody answered. The Instagram DM was my real application.
A manager who'd seen what I was building got in touch directly and invited me to explore an SDE II transfer to Amazon's London office. I hadn't been looking.
Once I committed, I spent a couple of weeks preparing before the three interview rounds began. I knew Amazon's interview process would lean on behavioural questions tied to the leadership principles, so I picked a small set of strong examples from my recent work and mapped each one carefully to the principles I expected most: Bias for Action, Ownership, Deliver Results. My thinking was that a few deeply rehearsed stories, told with real specificity and confidence, would land better than improvising something new under pressure every time. I made sure I could walk through each example with a tight structure: the situation, what I decided, why I decided it, and what we actually delivered or changed as a result.
Across the three rounds I reused those same core stories on purpose, tweaking the framing depending on what the interviewer was probing for. All three interviewers voted to hire, and I got the SDE II offer for the London role at £78,000. The on-site requirement was something I'd already factored in and was fine with.
Five months of searching, more than 400 applications across Indeed and LinkedIn, and a single interview to show for it. I started out cautiously optimistic. I had customer service experience, I was applying to remote roles that looked like a good fit, and I assumed something would land within a few weeks. It didn't. I kept a spreadsheet to track everything, and watching the row count pass 100, then 200, then 300 with no callbacks wore me down. I started doubting my resume, my cover letters, the whole approach. I rewrote the resume twice. I even applied to roles a step below my experience just to get any response. Still nothing. Some weeks I'd send 30 or 40 applications and hear back from none of them. The silence got exhausting in its own way.
Around the four-and-a-half-month mark, a Customer Service Representative posting on Indeed finally went somewhere. A screening call, then a full interview, the only one in the entire search. I thought it went well, but after months without feedback I couldn't tell. When the offer came in, it was below what I needed for the role to actually work financially. So I countered. I was scared to, because this was my one shot and I didn't want to lose it over a number. I spelled out exactly what I needed: $42,000. I gave my reasoning and sent it. Then they went quiet for what felt like forever, and I was sure I'd overplayed it and blown the only opportunity I'd had in five months.
Then they came back and met my number exactly. I accepted on the spot.
I'd been applying selectively, only four applications over those two months, because I didn't want to waste time on roles that weren't actually interesting. Most of my search was slow and discouraging. Then I came across a Substack post by the CTO of a New York data company about their decision to refactor their entire data pipeline around dbt and Snowflake. The post was technical, specific, and honest about the tradeoffs they'd made. It wasn't marketing. It read like someone who actually lived inside the problem, and I recognized a lot of the same pain points from my previous role.
I spent a couple of evenings on a cold email. I didn't pitch myself generically. I referenced specific paragraphs from the post and linked a public GitHub repo I'd built for stream-to-batch reconciliation. The repo wasn't perfect, but it was real work: documented, tested, and directly relevant to what he'd described. I figured if he was the kind of engineer who wrote that post, he'd at least look at the code. Three days later he replied. No recruiter, no application portal, no automated acknowledgment. Just a direct response asking if I wanted to jump on a call that week.
The process ended up being four rounds over about nine weeks. The first call was conversational, more mutual vetting than a formal screen. The third and fourth rounds brought in the broader data team and covered system design and past-project deep-dives. But the second round was the one that stuck with me. It was framed as a live SQL pairing session, and it started that way, but somewhere around the thirty-minute mark we were both heads-down on an actual production query they were struggling with. We went ninety minutes. I didn't solve it completely, but how I reasoned through it mattered more than any clean answer would have.
The offer came in at $145,000, hybrid in New York. I accepted.
The offer from an Austin startup came in on day 51. By then I'd been through five rounds of interviews and 22 applications I was working through at the same time. The process had been thorough: a technical screen, a take-home infrastructure scenario, two panel interviews with the platform engineering team, and a final conversation with the VP of Engineering. I was interested in the hybrid DevOps role. Austin made sense geographically, the team seemed sharp, and $132k base was competitive for where I was in my career.
Then I got to the equity portion of the offer letter. The package included 0.15% over four years with a one-year cliff. Not unusual on its face. But equity is only worth something if you can actually evaluate it. Any time stock is part of a comp conversation, I ask for the most recent 409A valuation and some visibility into dilution history. Those two documents tell you almost everything about whether the equity is real or just a number on paper. I sent a professional note to their CFO asking for exactly that before I'd sign anything.
What I got back was a runaround. The first response was vague and pointed me back to the offer letter itself, as if the strike price listed there was enough context. I followed up and asked again, specifically for the 409A and any cap table information they were willing to share. I got a flat refusal. No explanation, just a no. A company that won't share basic financial documentation with someone they're asking to take a four-year equity vesting commitment either has something to hide or a culture of opacity I don't want to be inside of.
I walked away from the offer. When I mentioned it to three engineering friends here in Austin over the following week, none of them were surprised. All three had heard nearly identical stories about the company within the past year.
I had been watching a US software company for a few months before I wrote to them. They were clearly preparing to expand into Latin America. Their blog posts mentioned plans for the region, two social posts in Spanish looked like a test, and their job board had nothing in Latin America yet. I decided not to wait for a job post that might never exist. I spent a weekend writing a one-page proposal and I sent it directly to their CEO. My argument was simple: if they expand into Latin America without a full-stack developer who speaks Spanish and works in the same timezone, they will have problems, and I could be that person. I kept it short and specific to their product, and I sent it cold on a Tuesday morning.
He answered the same day, and we had a call in the next 48 hours. That speed told me the timing was right. Then there were four rounds of interviews over about one month, in a format I had never seen before. The founder runs the company async-first, so there were no live technical interviews. I recorded Loom videos explaining how I would solve two architecture problems, and I wrote exercises about a localization strategy for one of their main features. It was slower and more careful than a normal interview panel, but it suited the way I work. I had time to think instead of performing under pressure, and I believe my answers were better for it.
The offer was USD 65,000 for a full-time job in Buenos Aires, on site, with quarterly meet-ups in Mexico City. On site made sense for this role. Being in Buenos Aires was the whole point of my proposal. With that salary here my purchasing power is strong. The number is not the top of the market, but in real life it is a lot, and that made the decision easy. Thirty-one days from my first email to a signed offer. I said yes the same afternoon.
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4 weeksSearch length
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