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One twenty-minute conversation at a logistics meetup turned into an internal job posting that landed in my inbox before it was on the company's careers page.
I'd been an operations manager at a small ecommerce company in Mexico City for three years. The company grew fast for two years and then plateaued. I'd hit my own ceiling on what I could change there. I'd been quietly looking for a role at a logistics-focused company, but the search wasn't going anywhere. Partly because I wasn't actively applying. Partly because most logistics-focused companies in Mexico City didn't have the kind of public hiring process that made it easy to know what was open.
I went to a logistics meetup in late autumn, mostly because a friend was speaking. The COO of a Mexico City logistics company was in the audience and we ended up next to each other during the coffee break. We talked for about twenty minutes. It was specifically about a problem her team was working on at the time, how to scale warehouse operations from one site to four sites, and I described how we'd handled a similar problem at half the scale. We swapped WhatsApp numbers because she wanted to send me a paper she'd been reading on the topic.
Three weeks later she messaged me. The team had been about to post an operations manager role and she wanted to talk to me before they listed it publicly. Could I come in for a coffee?
The "coffee" was ninety minutes with her and one other senior operations person. We didn't really do an interview. We walked through three real problems they were working on, and most of the conversation was me asking clarifying questions and them answering them. By the end she said she'd put me through their formal process if I was interested.
The process was two interviews and a written exercise.
The first interview was the COO and the head of warehouse operations. Sixty minutes. They asked how I'd scale the warehouse network from one site to four. I'd thought about it. The answer was specific.
The second was a written ops-plan exercise. They gave me a one-page brief on a real problem, the rollout of a new warehouse in Monterrey, and asked for a six-page plan in a week. I sent back five pages with a one-page appendix. The discussion in the next round was specifically about the appendix.
The final round was a conversation with the founder, mostly about equity and what staying for three years would look like. He was direct. The equity grant on offer was meaningful relative to the comp.
The offer was US$45,000 base plus equity. I asked for US$48,000 plus a slightly larger equity grant, citing the equity arithmetic at a realistic exit. They came back with US$48,000 and a small equity bump. I accepted.
I'd sent one real application during the whole search, the one to that company, after the conversation. Everything else flowed from a twenty-minute hallway conversation I almost didn't have.
Finding a Singapore-based Engineering Manager role took me about 14 weeks from first application to signed offer, and it was more of a grind than I'd anticipated. I sent out 38 applications in total, leaning heavily on job boards and company career pages in the early weeks, but the responses were inconsistent and the timelines stretched long. Singapore's market for EM roles felt tighter than I'd expected. Most postings drew strong local and regional candidates, and as someone considering relocation, I had to work harder to stand out. After a few weeks of slow traction, I shifted my energy toward in-person networking. That was the move that actually mattered.
The break came when I attended a regional leadership offsite where the CTO of a Singapore engineering scale-up was a keynote speaker. His talk was about scaling engineering organizations across Southeast Asia, exactly the problem space I'd been thinking about, so the conversation afterward felt natural rather than forced. I didn't pitch myself that day. Instead I waited two weeks, then followed up with a short document outlining what I'd genuinely want to learn about their org structure, their current team challenges, and how they thought about EM scope at their stage of growth. That document seemed to signal intent without being pushy, and it got me into the process. Nine rounds followed over several weeks: technical conversations, a take-home exercise focused on org design, a values interview with the founder that went deeper than I'd expected, and a few stakeholder calls with senior engineers I'd potentially be managing.
The final package came in at $165,000 USD. The base was honestly a bit below what comparable US-market EM roles were offering at the time, but the company included expat health insurance and covered SG relocation costs, which made the overall picture work. After 102 days and 9 interview rounds, I accepted. The process was long, but the networking-first pivot was what got me in the door.
My move to Amazon's London office didn't start with a job application. It started with someone noticing my work. I hadn't been searching or refreshing job boards. I was heads-down, shipping features and trying to do the work well. Then a manager who'd seen what I built reached out directly and invited me to explore an SDE II transfer to London. That was when it hit me that the opportunity was real and I needed to take it seriously.
Once I committed, I spent a couple of weeks preparing before the three interview rounds began. I knew Amazon's loop would lean heavily on behavioural questions tied to the leadership principles, so I didn't build a wide, shallow bank of stories. Instead I picked a small set of genuinely 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 actually shipped 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. It felt almost too simple. But it worked. 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.
The lesson I keep coming back to is that visible, high-quality work is its own kind of networking. I didn't send a single cold message or touch my profile. The opportunity came to me because of what I'd already shipped. That's worth more than most job-search tactics I've read about.
I'd been quietly exploring new opportunities for about a month when I showed up to a Kotlin meetup in Toronto one February evening, mostly just 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, specifically state management and some of the rougher edges with shared UI logic across platforms. What I thought would be a five-minute chat stretched to nearly an hour. We swapped contacts before we left, and I honestly 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, and what I found was encouraging. Over the next five weeks or so I went through six applications 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, calmly, citing market rate for senior Android work in Toronto. They came back with CA$130,000. I accepted without hesitation.
6Applications
3Interviews
5 weeksSearch length
NetworkingSource
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