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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.
Looking for ML roles in Europe took longer and was more tiring than I expected. I sent 32 applications over about three months, and the rejections followed a clear pattern: most teams either required a PhD or wanted only experience with LLM fine-tuning. My background is recommender systems and production ML tooling, the unglamorous work that keeps models running at scale, and that combination fitted badly with job descriptions written with transformer research in mind. I reached interviews at six places, which felt low for the number of applications I sent, and some of those early rounds ended with feedback that confirmed I was not what they were looking for.
The offer came through a referral. A former colleague from a previous startup had joined Zalando in Berlin and gave my name internally when a Senior ML Engineer position opened. That seemed to make people read my application differently. The recruiter wrote to me within a week, which had not happened anywhere else in this search. The process was rigorous: three technical rounds about system design, coding, and my recommender work in production, plus one more interview that surprised me. They called it a paper-discussion round. I had to argue both sides of a recent ML paper and change position in the middle of the conversation when the interviewer disagreed with me.
The offer was 95,000 EUR for a full-time job in Berlin, on site. The base is lower than comparable roles in the US, and I knew that before, but the package included 30 days of holiday and full visa support, which made the real numbers work for my situation. Ninety-one days after I started applying, I said yes.
I published the case study on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning I had three replies in my LinkedIn inbox.
I had been thinking about looking for a job for a long time without doing anything. My plan was always the same: finish the portfolio first, then start applying. After two months of polishing, the portfolio was still not finished, so I tried the opposite. Take one project, write about it completely, publish it, and let people tell me if it was good enough.
The project was a redesign of the onboarding of a fintech company where I did not work. I was a customer and I had noticed three problems. During one long weekend I made a prototype of a flow that solved two of them, built a Figma file with notes on the frames, and published a text of 600 words on LinkedIn explaining what I changed and what I did not touch.
N26 answered within one day. Their head of design said the writing was the part that made her stop. Most case studies she sees are only images, with no explanation of the thinking behind them, and she wanted to talk to designers who can explain their trade-offs out loud.
The first call was 45 minutes with the head of design. We did not talk about N26 until the last ten minutes. Most of the time she asked how I made specific decisions in past projects: when I disagreed with a PM, when I delivered something that I knew was a compromise, what I learned about onboarding metrics from my own mistakes.
I presented three case studies to two designers from the team, one hour in total. They were interested in the decisions in between: why this typeface and not the obvious one, why I recommended removing a feature instead of repairing it. The questions always returned to constraints, not to craft.
Round three was a paid exercise at home: redesign their settings flow and document the trade-offs in a written summary, with a limit of five hours. I treated it as a real project, I did not polish it too much, and I delivered exactly what fitted in five hours. The summary was three paragraphs about what I cut, why, and what I would do next if I had a full week.
The last round was a conversation of 30 minutes with the CTO. We talked about the role, the team, what they would release in the next quarter, and if I would stay for two years. He was the most direct interviewer in the whole process.
The offer was €58,000. I asked once for a higher base salary, and I explained the scope they had described in the final round. They answered the same day with the same number plus a sign-on bonus that covered my relocation. I signed the contract.
I sent 18 applications in this whole search. Three of them were the answers to the case study post. The rest went to companies I chose because their product was close to the subject of my case study.
The whole thing moved faster than I expected. A recruiter reached out about the Sales Development Representative role at AlertMedia in Austin, and I almost passed because the posted comp felt low for the market. I went ahead anyway, sent in my application, and within about four weeks I had an offer in hand. Twenty-seven days total from first contact to close, across four interviews. But the number on that first offer sheet wasn't where I needed it, and I wasn't going to just sign and hope.
The standard SDR package was $52k base plus $20k in commission on their existing commission plan. I'd done enough research to know the OTE ceiling was the real problem: the structure made $72k nearly impossible to reach, and accelerators didn't kick in until 120%, a threshold most reps never hit during ramp. So I spent a weekend building a written analysis of their own funnel. I pulled what I could from public data and from what they'd shared in the interviews: average ramp timelines for SDRs in their segment, top-quartile MQL-to-meeting conversion rates, and the actual math on what a tiered accelerator above 110% would cost them versus what it would produce in pipeline. The whole document argued their side: restructure the upside and the same rep produces more pipeline than the accelerator costs.
They came back and rebuilt the plan: $52k base with $30k in commission, and accelerators starting at 110% instead of 120%. That put my on-target earnings at $82k, exactly where I needed to land. The base didn't move, but the variable comp was redone from the ground up. It gave them something concrete to take to finance.
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 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.
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.
I had been working as a backend engineer in India for a few years, and I felt I had reached a limit in the kind of work I was seeing. I wanted to work in a different market, with different engineering problems, and to learn more than I already knew. So I looked for international roles instead of only reading the usual local listings. I found a job platform focused on relocation, which filters for companies that sponsor visas and pay for the move, and I spent a few evenings each week going through the listings methodically. That is how I found Mercari in Tokyo. I had been following the company for some time. They were doing interesting things at scale, and the backend opening looked like a good fit. I applied through the platform and heard nothing for about ten days, and I was sure the application was dead.
When they answered, the process had four structured rounds over about two months. The first was a live coding session where I shared my screen and solved problems in real time, the kind of session where your reasoning matters as much as the final answer. The second was a deep technical interview with an engineer, about architecture decisions and about how I think through microservices: trade-offs, failure modes, how I would scale a specific system under load. That one I enjoyed most. It felt like a real conversation between engineers. The third was a mixed technical and behavioural round with a hiring manager, mostly about how I work inside a team and how I handle uncertainty. The last round was with a VP and was mostly behavioural, but it also covered how quickly I could become productive in an unfamiliar tech stack. That was a fair question, because I was joining from a different market.
My first interview was at the beginning of December and the offer arrived in February. I accepted the full-time, on-site role at 55,000 USD and started to prepare for the move to Japan.
I had wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years before. They were a serious publication, long-form, properly edited, careful with facts, and they paid their writers, which is rare. I read every issue I could find for a year before I did anything about it.
When I started looking for a job, it did not go well. I sent thirty applications in three months, mostly for content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" and not journalism. I got two interviews. One of them was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the whole search. A content marketing manager told me directly that the job was producing SEO content with an LLM, and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better".
That night I went home and decided to stop applying for content jobs. Instead I would write the kind of article I wanted to be paid for.
I chose two ideas that I thought the magazine would really publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that remote workers had slowly changed. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote a pitch of three paragraphs for each one and emailed them to the editor.
She answered about one of them, the neighbourhood article. She liked the idea, she had been thinking about other pitches on the same subject, and she offered me a 1,500-word draft on spec. The fee was €200, paid within thirty days after publication.
I wrote it. It took ten days. The editing was thorough. She disagreed with three sections and I rewrote them. The article was published in the May issue.
In late May, two months after we agreed the freelance article, the editor emailed me. They had opened a permanent staff writer position and she wanted to talk to me before they published it. The shortlist was already her, the editor-in-chief and the publisher. The "interview" was a conversation of forty minutes about the work I wanted to do, what I was reading, and one article in the magazine that I would have edited differently.
The "test" was a 600-word article on a subject she gave me the next day. I had two days. I wrote eight hundred words, cut one hundred and fifty, and sent it. They sent the offer two days later.
The offer was €26,000 base, which is a normal staff writer salary in Spain and is acceptable. I asked for €30,000. I explained the freelance work I had already done for them, and that the role included running their newsletter. They came back at €28,000 and a small monthly payment for travel for assignments. I took it.
30Applications
2Interviews
4 monthsSearch length
Cold outreachSource
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