The Next Chapter
When I left the waiter job and returned to engineering, I knew I wanted something different. Not just a different job, but a different way of working. The kind where your location does not limit the problems you can solve.
I found that in Thailand, working for a South African company called Exonic.
Why Bangkok
After Dubai, I wanted somewhere with a lower cost of living where I could build runway while working remotely. Bangkok checks that box. The city is a hub for remote engineers. The internet is fast. The infrastructure works. The street food is better than any restaurant I have ever worked in.
I arrived with a laptop and a clear goal: find a remote role where I could work on meaningful projects without being tied to a physical office.
Landing the Role at Exonic
Exonic is a technology consulting company based in South Africa. They serve clients across multiple industries and geographies. When I found the opening, it matched exactly what I was looking for: full time remote, exposure to diverse projects, and the chance to work across the full stack.
The interview process was practical. System design discussions, technical assessments focused on AWS and modern frontend frameworks, and conversations about how I approach end to end delivery.
I got the offer and accepted it immediately.
As a full time remote employee, I was embedded in Exonic's engineering team. My day to day involved building cloud native solutions for their clients, designing architectures on AWS, and shipping production systems across the entire stack. The team was distributed, and the work required communicating clearly across time zones.
Three Continents Through One Company
Exonic's client base spans the globe. Over my time there, I built production systems touching three different continents.
One project was Scoring AI, a voice enabled match scoring application for sports courts. Players start a match, share a link, and control the scoreboard using voice commands. I worked on the full stack: the real time scoring engine, voice command processing, the shareable match link flow, and the responsive display that works on phones, tablets, and court side screens. The stack was Svelte on the frontend with a Node backend deployed on AWS.
Another project was My IBD Pal for Ferring Malaysia, a healthcare application for patients with inflammatory bowel disease. This involved building patient facing interfaces and clinical backend systems, processing health data securely, and integrating with healthcare infrastructure in the Malaysian market. The project is protected and not publicly accessible.
I also worked on Real411, a digital complaints platform for Media Monitoring Africa in South Africa. The platform allows citizens to report digital offenses, track complaint status, and supports media regulation workflows. Full stack development, from the submission forms to the admin dashboard and trend analytics. This project is also under restricted access.
I also worked on Real411, a digital complaints platform for Media Monitoring Africa in South Africa. The platform allows citizens to report digital offenses, track complaint status, and supports media regulation workflows. Full stack development, from the submission forms to the admin dashboard and trend analytics.
Each project had different business contexts, different regulatory requirements, and different user bases. The engineering principles remained the same: understand the domain, design the solution, ship it, document it.
The AWS Solutions Architect Certification
Working across multiple AWS projects for different clients made one thing clear: I needed a formal credential that backed up the experience. The AWS Solutions Architect certification is the industry standard for cloud architecture knowledge.
I studied for six weeks. Not because the material is difficult, but because the scope is wide. Compute, storage, networking, databases, security, cost optimization. Each domain has multiple services and multiple trade offs.
The exam is scenario based. You are given a business requirement and you choose the architecture that meets it. Not just which service, but why. The certification forces you to think in trade offs: cost versus performance, latency versus durability, managed versus self hosted.
Passing it validated the patterns I had been applying in production for Exonic's clients. The theory matched the practice.
End to End Ownership
One of the best parts of the role was the scope. Exonic trusted me with full projects, not just isolated tickets.
An end to end project looked like this:
- Discovery. Understand the business domain. What problem are we solving? Who are the users? What are the constraints?
- Architecture. Choose the stack and design the system. Document the rationale.
- Implementation. Build it. Write tests. Set up CI/CD.
- Deployment. Put it in production. Configure monitoring and alerts.
- Handoff. Document everything. Train the team. Transfer ownership.
The AWS certification helped with step two. The experience working across different client contexts helped with step one. The discipline of shipping consistently helped with steps three through five.
What Changed
When I was in Cuba, I was a good engineer with limited options. When I was in Dubai working as a waiter, I was someone starting from zero in a new country. When I landed in Bangkok and joined Exonic, I was someone who had learned that the ceiling is not set by your location.
It is set by your ability to deliver.
Employers do not care where you log in from. They care whether the code compiles, the deployments succeed, and the systems stay up. If you can do that consistently, you can work from anywhere.
What I Learned
Full time remote is different from freelancing. Freelancing gives you flexibility. A full time remote role gives you stability, team structure, and exposure to larger projects. Both are valid, but they require different mindsets.
A South African company hiring someone in Thailand to build for clients in Malaysia, South Africa, and beyond is not unusual anymore. Geography is no longer a constraint. The companies that understand this win access to global talent.
Specific projects teach more than generic ones. Scoring AI taught me about real time voice processing on the web. My IBD Pal taught me about healthcare data compliance. Real411 taught me about building for media regulation workflows. Each project expanded my context, not just my tech stack.
Certifications validate what you already know. They are not a replacement for experience. But they make it easier to get past the first screening call.
Full ownership changes how you build. When you own the entire lifecycle, you design differently. You think about deployability from day one. You write documentation as you go. You build systems that do not require you to be on call forever.
I started my career in Cuba. I worked as a waiter in Dubai. I moved to Thailand and joined a South African company building for clients across three continents. The path was not linear, but it was worth it.
Top comments (0)