I worked at a Wayfair as a remote data engineer earning up to 70 to 80 thousand dollars per year. Roughly 60 to 70 lakhs in INR. In this article, I will give you my story, how i got my remote job as a data engineer. I will explain everything in this article from how i got started, how i got my first remote jobs, what are the different skills that i learned and different things that i worked on. So read this article from start to end to understand everything about my journey. Now, before we move forward, I just want to remove this wrong assumptions about the remote jobs. People think to get the remote jobs, you just have to keep applying to the various websites on LinkedIn or career page and one day some magic will happen and you will get the remote job.
This is not how things work. There are no shortcuts for this. You have to do a lot of work to get a job. you need to become capable enough for that company to hire you remotely and for this you will have to work on the different skill sets such as work on your resume, certificate, projects, build your github profile, network with other people. There are a lot of different variables that are attached to it and we will talk about everything in this article. Another point that i want to highlight is that luck also plays a major role. You can’t really control the luck part but you can increase the chances of getting lucky by working on a different skill set that we will talk about.
So consider there is one big ocean where you will find different islands that provides the remote job. At this point, you don’t even know these islands exist or they are looking for someone. You are completely unaware about it. Now, if you wait for some magic to happen or just think that one day I will automatically get to know about all of these islands and the opportunities they are providing. Do you think it is possible? No, right? You have to jump into the ocean first. You might or might not reach it. That is a completely different story. But if you don’t jump right now, then you will never find about all of these island this is very important point because most of the people complain about me that I don’t even know where to apply for the jobs.
I don’t even know which companies are hiring for these positions, which companies are looking for the remote engineers. They are just waiting that one day this opportunity will automatically come to them. This never happens. I get lot of opportunities and messages on my LinkedIn on weekly basis. The reason is that I jumped into this ocean and I started working on different things. This video is not something like the step-by-step guide to get the remote job. It doesn’t exist. There is no step-by-step guide to get a remote job. There are a lot of different variables attached to it. The path is completely scattered and very messy. But if you make yourself worthy enough and come into the top 5% engineers, then you will get so many opportunities that you can’t even handle.
So in this article, I will tell you about my journey and how I got the remote job. You will realize the path is not straightforward. there are different things that I worked on and eventually I got the remote job. And in the next video, we will talk about different strategies, how you can prepare to get the remote job. So in this aerticle, just understand my journey. But this is not how I started my journey. In 2019, I graduated from college.
and I started working as an associate data engineer from my internship. So I was doing internship in my final year and I got the full-time offer in that company. It was a startup based environment. So the companies used to provide consulting to the US and Europe client. We used to do a lot of projects on the data engineering, data science, machine learning. So I learned about many different things from there. Okay. This is important because I was learning how to build a project. I was learning how the projects gets delivered. Different skill set to work on a project such as data engineering, learning about cloud platforms, DevOps part, cloud engineering. There were many things that I got to do in a startup company because people working in these startup companies are always less.
So you have to do a lot of things by yourself. Now I worked in this job for a one year. This was the actual location job where I had to travel daily two to three hours to reach at my location. So I started finding different ways to grow from this and find something remote. Forget about the remote jobs. I didn’t even know remote job exists. I thought I’ll start with the freelance. So I started researching about freelancing. watching videos, reading blogs, understanding how freelancing really works. So I ended up creating my portfolio on Upwork and Fiverr, which took me more than two to three months of continuous learning how to create a good profile, how to write a proposal, how to talk to clients.
So again, learning was one of the first thing that happened in each and every step. I had to keep improving my skill set on various aspects. It did not happen in two to three days. Understand this. When you see someone else’s end result, you always think that it might be easy for him or her, but it was very hard for me and it is hard for everyone who goes through this journey. I used to learn about the freelancing day in day out. I used to understand how to write the better proposal. How do i create a good profile? What message or the keyword i should be putting it in my profile or in my proposal? How do i get the clients on calls how do i start talking?
All of these things you need to work on step by step. Okay, it does not happen in few days. It does not happen in few weeks. You have to daily work on it and one day you will eventually get some result and this happened in my case. Okay, so I applied for the proposal for two to three months. I did not get any reply but after continuous improvement and learning I got my first project as a freelance data engineer. Now this project was not core data engineering related project. This project was around the web scraping. So the client had some HTML files on the Google Cloud storage. He told me to write some Python script to extract data from this HTML file and load it onto the PostgreSQL database.
The task was very simple. I completed that project and I got around $100 for it. Now, this might have never happened if I didn’t jump into the ocean to explore the new things. I allocated time from my job and my usual routine to learn about freelancing and start applying for the different jobs. This is very important. This particular decision that I took changed my life completely. And this usually happens in life that one decision that you take can transform your entire life. The YouTube channel that you are seeing right now and all of the growth that has happened is because of the one decision that i took to learn something out of my routine and apply my skill set there. The reason i’m telling you all of these things is because i want you guys to have the real picture of what goes behind the scene.
Okay, most of the people think when they see a freelancer or person who was doing the remote job, they just see the end result. But there are a lot of different things they might be doing in the back end that help them to become the capable enough to get that job. Okay. So this is when you understand, do not skip the hard work part that the work that you have to put on day-to-day basis after four months of freelancing, I started working on multiple projects. I got a lot of clients and once i became the comfortable and found that freelancing is something that i can sustain for few years, I quit my job and become a full-time freelancer. I got a chance to work on various different technologies.
I was working on aws cloud, Google cloud, working on the real-time streaming of the data, helping people to build the end-to-end architecture. So I got to work on some of the amazing problems that people had. After working for six to eight months, I started thinking about my future again and how do I grow from this. So I wanted to move from these freelancing platforms that used to cost like 10% of my every fees and I wanted to do something outside of these platforms. So I thought of building my brand onto the LinkedIn. What did I do? I just started sharing my learnings and achievements onto LinkedIn. I used to share every single project that I used to work on, things that I learned, started interacting with the people, built my GitHub profile, shared all of the learnings, projects that I did on my LinkedIn profile.
After two months, suddenly a recruiter from the Wayfair company reached out to me and they were like, okay, we really like your profile. We saw some of your projects and we want to discuss the remote data engineering position at this company. They took around two to three rounds of the interviews where they asked me a few basic coding questions and few questions on my technical projects and the overall technical skillset. and i got the remote job. This looks very simple. I got the interview call, I gave the interview, and i got a job. But if you track my entire journey, you will realize that to reach at this stage, I had to go through multiple things. Go through the internships, learn a lot of things, go to a job, then quit my job to become a full-time freelancer, start creating the content, build some network online, share my work, and eventually i got the opportunity.
This is what i told you at the start. In order to get the opportunity, at least you have to jump into the ocean first. You need to jump and start swimming. Don’t wait for some boat to appear or don’t wait some opportunities to get handed over to you. I worked at a wafer for three years. I worked on some of the amazing projects from migration, SQL application, building a data warehouse on Google BigQuery, building end-to-end data architecture. and met some of the amazing people around the world. In the meantime, I used to get a lot of opportunities on my LinkedIn itself because I was sharing my work, but I couldn’t take it because I was already working full-time at a wayfair. I started creating content on my YouTube, sharing my journey so that other people can take benefit from it.
Now, this was how I got my first remote job. And you might think, okay, this might not apply for everyone. But the goal of this video was not to give you the step-by-step guidance on the remote job, we will talk about that part in the next video. But the goal of this video was to give you the reality, the picture behind the getting remote job or in general opening doors for different opportunities. Lot of people just sit there to not work on any skill set. They think, okay, if i get the certification, I’ll get the job. If I build this project, I’ll get a job. If I start creating the content, I will get a job. This is not how things work. It is not once and zero that if you do something, then you will definitely get the job.
You have to think from the long term point of view. if you do something for few weeks or few months and if you don’t get the result, do not get discouraged that this is not working. It takes time. So I just wanted to share the reality behind how i got the remote job. Most of the people who get the remote job also go through a similar journey. You might think, okay, this guy got the remote job because he applied to this company. But behind that, you will see a years of hard work building the skill set building the github profile, networking with the people. working on the right skill set in a project. So there are a lot of different factors that affects your chances to getting the remote job.
Thank you for reading.
