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The offer letter came through at £62k full-time hybrid, and my first reaction wasn't the excitement I expected after 41 days of searching and five rounds of interviews. It was more a quiet dread. I'd spent the last two years working four days a week at my previous company, and I genuinely wasn't sure I could go back to five without resenting it from day one.
The search itself had been grinding. I sent out 22 applications across Manchester and a handful of remote-friendly studios, heard back from a fraction, and most of the interviews I did land felt like they were going nowhere. The conversation with the design studio started differently, partly because I came in through a referral from a designer I'd worked with a few years back. That warm intro meant the first call felt less like an audition and more like a conversation about what the team actually needed. Over five interviews they walked me through their research process, their design system, and how product sat alongside engineering. Thorough, but it never felt adversarial.
When the written offer arrived I sat on it for a day before responding. I knew I wanted to ask for the four-day arrangement, but I'd seen that conversation go badly before, companies treating it as a red flag, suddenly unsure about your commitment. I kept the ask simple: I'd been working a four-day week, it suited how I do my best work, and I wanted to continue at 80% pay to reflect that. Their response surprised me. They came back and said they'd actually prefer to keep me at full salary, on the condition that I committed to a specific Wednesday rhythm, a standing research day the whole product team observed together. They wanted the consistency more than the cost saving, which I respected. I signed within an hour. No regrets.
A friend recommended me. I wouldn't have gotten through the front door otherwise.
I'd been a security engineer at a London fintech for four years and had been thinking about leaving for two of them. The role had a clear ceiling, and there was no room to move sideways into application security, where I wanted to spend more time. I'd also been quietly homesick for Singapore, where I grew up, and had been talking with my partner about whether moving back made sense.
A close friend from university had joined a Singapore fintech as the platform lead the previous year. He'd told me, more than once, that I should apply if a role opened up. I hadn't, mostly because I'd been waiting for a moment when the move felt right. The moment arrived in spring. Two friends in London moved away within the same month and I ran out of reasons to stay.
I told the friend. He passed my CV directly to the security team's hiring manager. The recruiter screen happened the same week.
The process was five rounds across three weeks. It was the most thorough interview process I've ever been through.
Round one was an application security round. Two engineers gave me a real piece of their codebase, a payment authorisation flow, and asked me to identify three security issues and three operational risks. I had ninety minutes. I found two security issues quickly, missed the third, and identified four operational risks. The reviewer told me afterwards that the third security issue was the one they were watching for.
Round two was infrastructure security. Different two engineers, different scenario: a Kubernetes cluster with a specific IAM setup and a question about how a compromised pod would or wouldn't escalate. We talked through it for an hour.
Round three was incident response. They gave me a transcript of a real outage from six months earlier, lightly anonymised, and asked what I'd have done at each decision point. There were two specific moments where I'd have taken a different call. I named them. We talked about whether they were right.
Round four was a leadership round with the head of security. Less technical. Real questions about handling a difficult engineer, a politically sensitive disclosure, and a project where the right answer cost more than the team had budgeted.
The final round was with the CISO. Twenty minutes. He asked what would make me leave the company in two years. I told him.
The offer was US$140,000 base, Singapore comp, paid in USD via a regional entity. I asked for US$148,000, citing the depth of the process and a comparable London role I'd also been talking to. They came back at US$145,000. I accepted, because the package, including the cost-of-living difference and the fact that I'd be near my parents again, was meaningfully better than London.
The friend's referral was the entire reason this happened. I hadn't been able to break into their process when I'd cold-applied two years earlier.
I'd been keeping a loose eye on the market for a few months when a friend who works at an Austin SaaS company mentioned my name to their VP of Marketing. No cold application, no evening spent tailoring a cover letter. The conversation just happened after I said over lunch that I was ready for something new. The VP reached out within a few days, and from that first email the process felt different from the automated-rejection cycle I was running in parallel across 27 other applications. Only one of those 27 led anywhere. This was it.
The process ran four rounds over about seven weeks. The first was a straightforward hiring manager screen: role expectations, my background, how I think about positioning and messaging. The second was a peer panel with two senior PMMs and someone from demand gen, and it was collaborative rather than interrogative. They wanted to know how I'd work alongside them, not just whether I could answer framework questions. The third round was the one that mattered most. A twelve-minute exec presentation on a competitor teardown of my choosing. I picked a company I'd already been watching out of pure curiosity, with a running doc of notes on their messaging shifts, pricing page changes, and launch cadences. I didn't dress it up. I walked through it the way I would if I were briefing an internal team before a launch, with a clear point of view and a recommendation at the end. That framing worked. The final round was a closer conversation with the CEO, more about culture fit and long-term ambition than anything technical.
The verbal offer came in at $100,000. When the recruiter used the word "flexible" in the same sentence as the number, I took it as an opening rather than courtesy and asked for $108,000, walking through my reasoning. They came back the next day and confirmed it. Accepted without hesitation.
After about six weeks of quietly exploring the market, 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, reached out unprompted and said he'd flagged my name to the Solutions Engineering manager at a Sydney B2B SaaS company. I hadn't even considered them seriously before that conversation, but the hybrid setup and the scope of the role made it worth pursuing properly.
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 fairly 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 reasonably confident after those. But round five was a panel with cross-functional stakeholders, and the tone shifted noticeably. They were clearly assessing how I'd handle internal politics, not just 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 minutes in, someone broke character and hit me with a hard CFO-style objection: budget authority questions, timeline scepticism, the kind of thing designed to knock you off your prepared flow. I acknowledged the concern directly, parked the slide I was on, and reframed the value case around risk reduction rather than feature set. It went sideways a second time near the end, when a "procurement lead" challenged our integration assumptions. I recovered by being honest about the constraint rather than bluffing through it. That moment of transparency was apparently what the hiring manager called out in the debrief.
The offer came two days later: a base of $140,000 AUD plus a sign-on bonus equal to one month's base. I accepted without hesitation.
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