How a senior engineer returning from a 4-year career break rebuilt her professional network across three tech ecosystems in 120 days — and landed a Lead Engineer role through a connection made while scaling payment microservices in Singapore.
Senior Engineer – 4-year career break, network gone cold
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Role: Full-Stack Developer
Duration: 60 days (first term) + second term in Nordic cybersecurity
Fatima had been a strong senior engineer before her career break. She'd built real systems, worked with talented teams, and earned respect in Dubai's tech scene. But four years away changed everything. The network she'd built had moved on — former colleagues were now at different companies, in different roles, thinking about different problems. When she reached out, the conversations were polite but distant. "The person who left" was how people remembered her. She needed to rebuild from scratch, and she needed to do it fast.
A Singapore fintech SaaS company building a cross-border payment platform — processing transactions across 12 Asian markets with real-time settlement.
A full-stack developer to work on the payment API infrastructure — building the microservices that handled transaction routing, currency conversion, and settlement logic.
An Engineering Lead building scalable payment architecture. A team of 6 engineers working on cloud-native infrastructure. A Founder deeply connected to Singapore's fintech ecosystem.
Cross-border payments at scale meant the code had to be bulletproof. The engineering work was complex, modern, and exactly the kind of work that demonstrated current technical capability.
"My old network remembered me as the person who left. My new network knows me as the engineer who scaled payment microservices and built API infrastructure. The Singapore Lead introducing me to the Dubai SaaS founder worked because he vouched for my ability to build scalable products."
— Fatima, Dubai
The Singapore Engineering Lead's introduction to a UAE SaaS founder led to a conversation about a Lead Engineer role at a fintech building payment infrastructure. The Founder called the Singapore Lead, who described Fatima's work on the payment microservices — the architecture decisions, the code quality, and her ability to contribute at a senior level from day one. Fatima interviewed and was hired as Lead Engineer.
Fatima's code spoke for itself within the first week — the Engineering Lead recognised her capability immediately through the work itself.
Doing modern, complex engineering work gave Fatima a new professional identity: "the engineer building scalable products" replaced "the person who left."
Singapore → Nordic → UAE: each term opened a new ecosystem, and connections across ecosystems created opportunities that a single network never could.
This hypothetical scenario shows how real product work rebuilds networks faster than any other approach. Your path back into tech could start today.