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One twenty-minute conversation at a logistics meetup became an internal job posting that arrived in my inbox before it was on the company's careers page.
I had been an operations manager at a small ecommerce company in Mexico City for three years. The company grew fast for two years and then stopped growing. There was nothing more I could change there. I wanted a job at a logistics company, but nothing was happening. Part of the reason was that I was not really applying. The other part was that most logistics companies in CDMX do not post their jobs publicly, so it was hard to know what was open.
I went to a logistics meetup in late autumn, mostly because a friend was speaking. The COO of a logistics company in the city was in the audience, and we stood next to each other in the coffee break. We talked for about twenty minutes. She told me about a problem her team had at that moment: how to grow warehouse operations from one site to four. I told her how we solved a similar problem at my company, but at half the size. We exchanged WhatsApp numbers because she wanted to send me a paper she had been reading about it.
Three weeks later she wrote to me. Her team was going to post an operations manager job, and she wanted to talk to me before they published it. Could I come for a coffee?
The "coffee" was ninety minutes with her and one more senior person from operations. It was not really an interview. We went through three real problems they had, and most of the time I asked questions and they answered. At the end she said she would put me into their official process if I was interested.
The process was two interviews and a written exercise.
The first interview was with the COO and the head of warehouse operations. Sixty minutes. They asked how I would grow the warehouse network from one site to four. I had already thought about this, so my answer was specific.
The second part was a written exercise. They gave me a one-page brief about a real problem, opening a new warehouse in Monterrey, and asked for a six-page plan in one week. I sent five pages and a one-page appendix. In the next round we talked mostly about the appendix.
The last round was a conversation with the founder, mostly about equity and about what staying for three years would look like. He was direct. The equity they offered was large compared to the salary.
The offer was US$45,000 base plus equity. I asked for US$48,000 and a little more equity, and I showed them my own numbers for what the equity would be worth in a realistic exit. They came back with US$48,000 and a small increase in equity. I took the job.
I sent only one real application in the whole search.
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.
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.
I'd been looking for new opportunities for about a month when I showed up to a Kotlin meetup in Toronto one February evening, cold enough that half the room still had their toques on, mostly to get out of the apartment and talk shop with other Android developers. The turnout was decent, maybe thirty people, and I ended up next to an engineer from Wattpad during the break. We started comparing notes on Compose Multiplatform, on state management and some of the rougher edges with shared UI logic across platforms. A five-minute chat stretched to nearly an hour. We swapped contacts before we left, and I didn't think much of it beyond a good networking moment.
About a week later he messaged me out of nowhere. A senior Android Developer position had just opened up internally, and he asked if he could put my name in. I said yes immediately. I'd done some light research on Wattpad before: Toronto-based, product-focused, reasonably sized engineering team. It looked encouraging. Over the next five weeks or so I went through six applications in total for other roles while this one moved forward, but the Wattpad process was by far the most structured and engaging. Three rounds. A hiring manager screen where we talked about my experience with production-scale Android apps and what I wanted next. A technical live-code session where they handed me a real recursive layout bug they'd actually hit in production, and that one kept me on my toes because the fix wasn't obvious until I traced the measurement pass carefully. Then a team panel with three engineers that felt more like a genuine conversation than an interrogation.
The offer landed about a week after the final panel, thirty-eight days after that initial meetup conversation. It came in at CA$125,000. I pushed back once, citing market rate for senior Android work in the GTA. They came back with CA$130,000. I said yes.
6Applications
3Interviews
5 weeksSearch length
NetworkingSource
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