New dad, senior dev — landed a remote offer in three months.

Hello everyone, I'm Kent. I currently work remotely as an iOS engineer, and I'm happy to share my experience through Brix.

Today I'll share how I found remote work and some of my reflections on it. I hope it helps you find a role that better fits your life and your career direction.

I graduated in 2015 and have been doing iOS work ever since. Previously I worked onsite; now I'm a Senior Engineer at a North American sports brand, primarily using SwiftUI.

I started remote work in January 2022. It was during the pandemic. I had just left a company in Shanghai and joined a foreign-owned company that made audio and video collaboration software, similar to Feishu. They offered a fully remote position, and that was my first transition from full-time onsite to full-time remote.

How did the two remote jobs differ?

The businesses were different, but the collaboration methods were quite similar. Both used agile development: quarterly and monthly sprints, task breakdowns, CI collaboration, and iOS industry best practices.

The main difference was team composition. Even though my first remote job was at a foreign company, it was essentially a China division, so my day-to-day colleagues across backend, frontend, and design were mostly Chinese.

My current team is fully global. The iOS team has five people: two colleagues based in North America, one in Europe, and me and another colleague in China. Our backend, designers, and PM are all foreign. The biggest difference is cross-timezone collaboration, which the previous China-based team didn't really have.

How do you manage cross-timezone collaboration?

Beyond agile development, our team has developed some agreed-upon communication norms. First, when creating a task or requirement, we provide as much context as possible so that whoever reads it can understand the problem clearly, the delivery criteria, and the testing requirements from the written description alone.

Second, to accommodate members in different time zones, we set a fixed daily window for our standup meeting. In that meeting, we each share progress, discuss tasks that need further collaboration, and raise any challenges we're facing. We also cover upcoming work to keep team goals aligned.

Remote global teams work when you give people enough context, and when you read deeply before you ask.

Compared to my previous China-based remote team, working with a global team requires you to give others much more information and context when describing problems. And when someone else poses a question to you, you need to read carefully and do more background research to understand it. That's become a shared expectation on our team, and an important work habit in remote work.

What did you do to prepare for this remote role?

The turning point came when the foreign company I mentioned went through significant layoffs. A few colleagues and I left around the same time. One colleague and I were both in the same life stage, about to become new dads, so our main goal was to find something that balanced work and life.

I looked at the domestic iOS job market and concluded that at our age, finding a role in China that matched or exceeded our previous salary would probably require enormous time commitments. Most likely 996. It would be hard to leave room for life.

We then analyzed our technical strengths and backgrounds. Within China's major tech companies, I had some edge in audio and video specifically. For general iOS at a senior level, I felt my niche was relatively narrow. So my key advantages were audio and video experience, plus experience working at a foreign company. Put together, roles at companies based in the US, Europe, or Singapore that offered remote work felt both realistic and aligned with what I wanted.

How did you approach the job search?

Once I had that goal, we broke it into tasks: what do we need to do to meet the requirements of these roles, and where do we start? Two things mattered most: external channels and English.

For channels, I focused on LinkedIn, Remote OK, Jobgether, FlexJobs, and similar platforms. For English, my colleague and I initially planned to study IELTS together for six months. We spent real time on vocabulary.

But while studying and applying at the same time, I realized my actual goal was to improve my spoken English enough to cross the threshold for overseas job search. Studying IELTS was a very long detour to get there.

What changed your English-learning strategy?

After a period of study, I found a more targeted approach: practice English specifically for the scenarios you'll actually use in remote work, especially job interviews and daily work communication. Use AI tools to extract the sentence patterns and vocabulary relevant to those contexts, and drill specifically for those situations.

Studying this way, spoken English improves quickly because you only need to focus on your own domain. I started treating English as a tool to learn, not a language to learn. For example, in an interview, I might only understand five or six words in a sentence, but I could still fully grasp what the interviewer meant because the context was one I knew deeply.

As I accumulated interviews across Korea, Singapore, and Europe, my confidence grew. I'd encourage everyone to be bold and try. For iOS developers specifically, there's no real technical barrier to applying for remote work globally. The submission platform is the App Store worldwide, so the development language and best practices are universal. The only barrier is language. Once you cross it, you'll find a much wider world.

How long did the job search take?

About three months in total. Three months later, I had an offer from a US company. I was just looking through old emails at lunch and counted roughly ten or more interview invitations.