How Prateek went from 20 years at Amazon to a remote Director of Engineering role, with 10 interviews and two offers in two months

Prateek had been at Amazon for more than 20 years, most recently as a senior engineering manager at Prime Video. He had been looking on his own for a while, and the market just was not answering the way you would expect for someone with that background.

Within the first two months of his search with us he had 10 interviews and two offers. He took a remote Director of Engineering role at Compass, with more than $300,000 in base salary.

A former Amazon colleague sent him our way

We had already reached out to him on LinkedIn and by email, and the message was sitting in his inbox. What tipped it was asking around. He got in touch with a former Amazon colleague, now a senior executive at another company, to ask whether he was looking too. That colleague was not, and pointed him toward us along with a couple of other names. Prateek tried those as well, found nobody actively looking, and decided to go with us.

The market analysis showed him it was not as bad as it looked online

Before anything went out, we took him through a resume analysis and where he fit in the market. If you spend any time on Blind, the job market reads as one long complaint, and he had been reading it.

“I think you were very upfront in terms of hey this is the resume analysis this is where I see you fit in the market and that video was helpful because it gave me confidence that it's not like a really doomsday out there right there is stuff happening.”

He went into his interviews knowing where he stood.

“At least I know that I can defend my stuff and it worked out.”

A rewritten resume and direct emails to hiring teams brought the responses

Our resume writer rebuilt his resume from what he had told us on his calls, and pitched it at an executive level. Prateek thinks this is the step people are most tempted to skip.

“So the resume got picked up very quickly. That's a very important step versus skipping that and doing your own.”

The bigger driver, in his view, was the outreach. For each role we found the company email addresses of the people doing the hiring and wrote to them directly.

“I think the most response I got was from the emails to be fair. So the magic of how you guys found out those email addresses, the company emails, that's your sort of IP, right?”

Across his search that came to about 75 applications, more than 300 hiring-team contacts identified, and about 75 direct emails. When we recorded this, they were still bringing replies.

“I'm seeing a lot of responses coming even still I'm getting right till today like the GM role they came back and they're like hey we want to talk.”

He dropped the roles that were never going to pay

Prateek has led teams as a technical program manager as well as in software development, so we also put him forward for some director of TPM roles. Paramount and a few other companies called. He asked about pay early, heard it would not meet what he was after, and stopped there, because there was no point putting effort into a role he was never going to take. Casting the net that wide had been his idea in the first place, and he is happy to say so.

The search in numbers

• 10 interviews and 2 offers in the first two months
• Remote Director of Engineering at Compass, more than $300,000 base
• About 75 applications, more than 300 hiring-team contacts identified, and about 75 direct emails to hiring teams
• Level: Director. Function: Engineering