Job Switching Isn’t Easy. Sharing My 4-Month Journey

I’ve been trying to switch roles for the last 4+ months, and the journey has been tougher than I expected. I’m currently working at Standard Chartered GBS in the Financial Markets division as a Backend Engineer. I’m a 2023 graduate from an old IIT, and I’ve been working in high-throughput backend systems since then.

My core stack: Java, Spring Boot, Quarkus, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Docker/Kubernetes, and GraphQL. Most of my work sits in distributed systems, caching, Kafka Streams, and performance-critical backend services.

Even with this experience, most interview calls I’m getting are from startups. And over the last few months, I’ve faced rejection in 5 different startups, all at the last manager round. Either the required tech stack was very different, or they expected extremely deep specialization in a niche part of their stack.

This phase has been frustrating, especially reaching the final round repeatedly. But I’m taking each experience as feedback. Every round shows me what to refine, how to communicate my work more clearly, and what areas I still need to strengthen.

I’m staying persistent and continuing to prepare. If anyone has advice, guidance, or referrals that align with my background, it would mean a lot.