Hello TS, thanks for sharing.

I am currently working as a data scientist in a major international bank with multiple past job experience (last one parent company is china largest e-commerce as well as some regional tech startups).

On a week to week basis, I have been receiving PMs from recruiters on LinkedIn - unfortunately none of those recruiter are offering what I’m looking for. (I got multiple recruiter from bytedance but I’m trying to avoid going back to china 996 culture)

I’ve been mass applying for roles in FAANG (primarily SG office) over the years but didn’t get any feedback from their internal recruiter. I have also took the initiative to private message some recruiter/internal staff from their companies but most of them ended up asking me to apply via their career site. I suspect the biggest invisible wall is the need to obtain working visa for Malaysian, which is becoming harder than ever due to Covid and Singapore change of policy.

Personally, I’m quite confident I have the technical skill set (and the soft skills) to score the interview for roles I have applied for, but I’m having trouble getting any interview to begin with. Do you have any advice on what can I do to improve my odds on scoring an interview with these companies?

Seeing your reply to some forumer earlier to drop you their CV for you to pass to your ex-colleague - Do you mind taking in my CV if it helps?

This post has been edited by LovelyPotato: Feb 24 2022, 04:49 PM

It’s a shame really. I am having a hard time finding company that have great data infrastructure which in turn can enable me to grow further on my career path but I’m hitting this wall at this point.

Most of the companies within Malaysia just doesn’t have that kind of backend infra to cultivate this kind of job.

Personally I’ve worked in start-up tier company and e-commerce with Alibaba backend support (worked closely with Alibaba team actually) and currently with one of the largest international bank with strong Asia presence.

I would say I have experienced through 3 tier of analytic infra. First is the messy but are working toward proper datalake/data warehousing. They have the data and you can get the data easily if you know the right place to ask for. Most of the SME/startup are currently in this stage.

Second is one with strong backend support (Alicloud) with proper data governance. Something FAANGs would have. The more established companies I can see in Malaysia with this sort of infra that isn’t FAANG is Shopee, Lazada, Grab, AirAsia and probably some telco like Axiata. There are more choices in SG as well such as Gojek and bytedance, but still very limited by nature.


Third is one with huge amount of data, but with all the legacy tool and the massive amount effort needed to consolidate them causing it to move extremely slowly. On top of that, regulated industry makes it even harder. This type of company requires a huge amount of time dealing with bureaucracy. Most international companies is at this stage.

Personally I still prefer the second type because of the ease of access to data and tooling, where you can achieve the most with the least effort in trying to hack through everything just to get the result.

Currently I’m looking to develop my skill set on building ML model that can productionize, which is the main reason why I’m looking for FAANGs as the next career jump.

Most of the existing SME does not need this level of model and do not have the proper data pipeline that can make it work as well. BI would be a better use of their resource as compared to data science. This leaves me with second and third type and bureaucracy is an unnecessary blocker for technical development.

Sorry TS might have swayed away from your AMA.

This post has been edited by LovelyPotato: Feb 28 2022, 10:06 PM

I’ve tried applying Meta, Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon. Netflix have very limited DS role in SG. Unfortunately none of them gotten back to me.

I’m also currently trying to apply to some other MNC within SG to kickstart the move to SG first, which will then make the next step easier as compared to jump directly from Malaysia.

I guess a referral really makes the most difference here.