Should Singaporean Engineers Bet on US Startups Now?

At 24, I joined a deeptech startup in New York City with no industry experience and no qualifications anyone in agtech would have recognised. No playbook. No mentors. No safety net. I was paid less than my Singapore peers at MNCs and the Series A had not yet closed when I signed.

I almost didn't say yes.

The reason I almost didn't say yes is the same reason most Singapore engineers I talk to today don't apply for the US startup roles they're qualified for. It wasn't the visa. It wasn't the salary math. It wasn't the cost of living. It was a single sentence that has held back more Singaporean careers than any government policy or scholarship bond:

"What if it doesn't work out?"

This essay is for the version of you that has been asking that question quietly for months. You're a software engineer or product manager or designer at a Singapore-based company. You're paid well by local standards. You read the US tech LinkedIn posts and you wonder. You've maybe even idly browsed a few job boards. And every time you get close to actually doing something about it, the same internal voice asks the same internal question, and you close the tab.

What I learned over the four years I spent in New York is that the question is asked backwards. The company I joined grew from 1 to 150-plus employees while I was there. We landed 20-plus Michelin-starred restaurant clients. We secured USD 50M in Series A funding. I led the company's market entry into Los Angeles. By the time I came back to Singapore at 28, I had operating experience that no Singapore career path could have given me in twice the time. I now run trynexus.now, where I place Singapore tech professionals at US startups end-to-end. So when I tell you the bet is worth making for the right person, I'm telling you from inside the trade — not from a LinkedIn-influencer take.

This is the honest case for why most Singapore engineers should be making this bet, who shouldn't, and what the actual decision looks like once you stop letting "what if it doesn't work out" be the loudest voice in the room.

The salary math is real, but it isn't where the bet pays off

Let me get the surface-level number out of the way honestly, because most of the LinkedIn discourse on this gets it wrong by ignoring tax.

A senior software engineer at Shopee Singapore in 2026 is making roughly SGD 120k to 160k base. A staff engineer at Grab or GovTech, maybe SGD 180k to 220k. Singapore income tax is low — effective rates in the 11 to 15 percent range at those incomes — so the take-home on SGD 150k is around SGD 130k.

The same engineer at a Series B startup in San Francisco is looking at USD 180k to 220k base. The straight conversion to SGD looks like a 50 to 100 percent uplift. It isn't, once you actually run the numbers.

US federal income tax at that bracket runs around 17 to 18 percent effective. California state tax adds another 7 to 8 percent. FICA takes 5 to 6 more. The combined effective rate lands somewhere around 30 to 33 percent — meaningfully higher than Singapore's. Take-home on USD 200k in San Francisco is closer to USD 135k. Converted to SGD at current rates, that lands in the SGD 175k range. Now subtract San Francisco rent, which can easily run USD 3,500 to 5,000 a month for a one-bedroom against Singapore equivalents at SGD 3,000 to 4,500 — and the disposable cash uplift narrows further, sometimes to something modest.

That is the honest comparison. The headline base-pay number is not the bet.

The bet is everything that compounds afterwards.

The bet is the equity — the part Singapore engineers consistently undervalue because Singapore-based ESOPs have trained you to mentally discount it to zero. ESOP grants from Singapore startups are usually small, often vest on disappointing schedules, and rarely produce life-changing outcomes for early employees. So when a US Series B offer lands with 0.05 to 0.2 percent equity attached, the typical Singapore engineer mentally discounts it to zero. That is the most expensive arithmetic mistake I see Singaporeans make. At a Series B with a USD 500M to 1B post-money valuation, 0.1 percent equity is worth USD 500k to USD 1M at current valuation, and Series B-to-C startups are supposed to grow into multiples of that. Across a four-year vest, the expected value of the equity often equals or exceeds the base — and equity outcomes have a long right tail no Singapore comp package can mathematically produce.

The bet is the growth trajectory. A staff engineer at a US Series B startup is shipping more, owning more scope, making more decisions, and operating closer to the actual market frontier than they would ever do inside a regional role. Two to four years of that compounds. The version of you that comes out the other side is operating at a level the global market values at a different rate.

The bet is the optionality. A few years of US startup operating experience repositions every subsequent career choice you make for the next twenty years. You become hireable at a different tier of company anywhere in the world. You become legible to founders and investors who would never have read your CV before. The career value of that compounds long after you have stopped earning the US-denominated salary.

If you are choosing this bet because of the year-one base-pay number, you have misread the offer. The base pay is the floor. The thing you are actually buying is what those years do to your trajectory.

"Play it safe" is the most expensive bet a Singapore engineer can make

Here is the thing nobody quantifies for you when you're deciding whether to leave a comfortable Singapore role.

If you stay at a regional firm for the next ten years, your salary will probably double. Your stock options, if you have them, will produce nothing or something modest. You will be technically competent, well-credentialed, and indistinguishable from the other thousand engineers who made the same choice. Your career trajectory will look exactly like the median trajectory of an NUS Computing graduate from your cohort.

If you go to a US startup that fails — and many of them do — and you come back to Singapore in three years with nothing to show for it on paper, you will still be more valuable in the Singapore market than you would have been if you'd stayed. US startup operating experience is a credential here. Hiring managers at Sea, Grab, GovTech, the regional offices of US firms — they all read "two years at a Series B in SF" as a positive signal even if the startup went to zero. You will have shipped more, owned more scope, made more decisions, and built a network of people who will hire you for the rest of your career.

The asymmetry is brutal and most engineers don't see it. The downside of betting is much smaller than the downside of not betting. The upside of betting is much, much larger.

The biggest risk is not failure. The biggest risk is staying still while the world's best career bet sits one decision away.

The Singaporean question that holds everyone back: "So what do you do exactly?"

When I came back to Singapore at 28 with no clean job title and a stretch of unstructured years behind me, the question I got the most often was "So what do you do exactly?"

To the Singaporean reader, you know exactly what that question carries. It's not curiosity. It's a request for a card-fitting answer. Something your relatives can understand at Chinese New Year. Something that fits on a name card. Something that can be slotted into the legible career hierarchy that runs from MOE scholar through SAF officer through GLC executive through eventual condo and Tesla.

A US startup role doesn't fit on a name card cleanly. "Engineer at Mercury" or "PM at Plaid" or "Founding eng at a stealth Series A" — your auntie has not heard of any of these companies. Your uncle who works at DBS will ask if it's a real job. Your parents will worry. Your secondary school WhatsApp group will not know how to react.

This is the unspoken cost of betting on the US startup ecosystem from Singapore. It is not the cost of the visa. It is not the cost of the move. It is the social cost of breaking the contract — the one your family signed on your behalf before you could speak.

I'm not going to pretend this cost is small. For some Singaporeans, especially the ones whose families have invested heavily in their education, it is the largest barrier to making the move. I've watched candidates with USD 200k+ offers in hand turn them down because they couldn't bring themselves to tell their parents.

But here is what I think after seven years of watching this pattern: the social cost compounds in the wrong direction. The longer you stay on the legible path, the more "what do you do exactly" becomes the only question you know how to answer. The muscle for sitting with an unconventional answer atrophies. By 35, you've become someone who needs the name card to define them. And a career defined by name cards is a career that is fundamentally at the mercy of whoever hands them out.

What I tell anyone who asks me about NS and family

The Singapore-specific objections are real and they deserve a real answer, not a wave-it-away.

On NS reservist obligations. All the candidates I work with are post-ORD. The high-level position is that most reservist cycles can be deferred when you have permanent employment abroad, which means post-ORD NS commitments should not function as a real barrier to working in the US. The specifics vary enough by individual that I won't pretend to give blanket advice — your reservist situation is between you and MINDEF, not something to outsource to a placement firm. As a category-level answer though, this is rarely the thing that should actually stop you.

On parents. This is harder and I won't pretend otherwise. The thing that has worked best for the candidates I've placed is making the parental conversation about specifics rather than abstractions. "I'm moving to America" is terrifying. "I'm joining a company that's already paid the visa fee, I have a job offer in writing, my base salary is USD 195k, I've found an apartment, here's the flight date, here's when I'll come back for Chinese New Year" — that is a different conversation. Concrete plans deflate abstract fears.

On the partner. If your partner has career portability — they're a doctor, a designer, a software engineer themselves, a remote worker — the move usually works. If your partner is in a Singapore-specific role with no US analogue, the conversation is harder, because the H-1B1 dependent visa does not generally grant work authorisation. This is the single most common reason I've seen candidates decline US offers, and I think it's a legitimate reason. The fix is usually that the partner pursues their own work-authorising visa, which is a separate piece of work but very doable for many roles.

None of these are showstoppers. They are logistics. The reason they feel like showstoppers is that the Singapore default is to look for a reason not to do something risky and stop the moment you find one. If you flip the polarity and look for reasons it could work, almost all of them are tractable.

What thriving in a US startup actually requires (and what it doesn't)

I joined my first US startup at 24 with no industry experience and no qualifications anyone in the agtech world would have recognised. There were no playbooks. No mentors. No HR department. Just a massive learning curve and a level of ambient pressure that was unlike anything I had felt before.

What I learned in the first 15 months in New York was more than I had learned in the previous 15 years of school. Not because I was suddenly smarter. Because nobody was optimising my path for me. Discomfort became my default state of mind, and once you sit with that long enough, your growth trajectory shifts in a way that doesn't reverse.

Here is what actually matters for thriving in a US startup, in rough order of importance:

The willingness to operate without a playbook is the single biggest differentiator. Most Singapore engineers have spent their entire careers inside well-defined processes — quarterly OKRs, structured promotion ladders, design docs reviewed by three layers of management. US Series A and B startups don't have those. You're handed a problem, told the company will die if it doesn't get solved, and asked to figure out the rest. The engineers who thrive treat that ambiguity as the work. The engineers who struggle treat it as a problem to be eliminated by process.

Ownership at a level the Singapore corporate environment rarely demands. At a Singapore MNC, you ship a feature and someone above you owns whether it succeeded. At a US startup, you ship a feature and you own whether it succeeded. Including the metrics. Including the user research. Including the on-call. Including the cleanup if it broke. This sounds exhausting and it is, but it's also why the learning curve compounds — you get the full feedback loop, not the slice your role description allowed.

Comfort with directness. American startup culture, especially in early-stage West Coast environments, is much more direct than Singapore corporate culture. People will tell you your code is bad. They will tell you your strategy is wrong. They will tell you your demo was flat. They will not soften it. The Singapore reflex is to read this as personal attack. It is not. It is how the work moves faster. The engineers who learn to receive direct feedback and give it back in kind move up fast. The ones who can't, struggle.

What does not matter as much as Singapore engineers tend to assume:

Pedigree. Almost nobody at the Series A and B startups I work with cares whether you went to NUS, NTU, SMU, or SUTD. They care whether your last six months of GitHub commits look like the work of someone who can ship. The Stanford-CMU-Berkeley network exists, but it matters less at the operator level than the LinkedIn discourse suggests.

Big-company brand recognition on your resume. Founders at the companies I place engineers into are often more impressed by "engineer at a 50-person startup that survived" than "engineer at Google for two years." Survival in a small environment signals more than rotation through a large one.

Perfect English idiom or American cultural fluency. You will need to be operationally fluent. You will not need to make American jokes or watch American sports. The bar is "can you ship and communicate clearly," not "can you pass for local."

Alignment, not credentials, is what actually predicts who lasts

The placements I've watched succeed long-term and the placements I've watched fail within 18 months had almost nothing to do with technical skill. Both groups were technically competent. Both had clean track records. The difference was alignment.

Specifically, alignment between three things: the candidate's stage of career, the company's stage of growth, and the founder's actual operating style.

A senior engineer who has spent ten years inside well-resourced organisations does not thrive at a Series A with three engineers and no infrastructure. The skills don't transfer in the way you'd expect. The people who do well at Series A are operators who get energy from chaos and ambiguity, regardless of what they did before. The people who do well at Series C are operators who can take an existing system and make it better, also regardless of what they did before.

I've been forced to learn this the hard way. Two years ago I would have told a senior Sea Group engineer that any US startup was a clear upgrade. Now I'd tell them: not the seed-stage one. The seed-stage one will eat them alive, not because they're not good, but because their skills are calibrated for a different game. The Series B with 80 engineers and a real engineering org might be the right step. The 8-engineer Series A with no design partners and a pivoting product is not.

This is the part of the placement work that most resembles matchmaking. You can have two perfectly qualified people on either side of the table and the placement still won't stick if the alignment isn't there. Conversely, a candidate who looks like a stretch on paper will thrive if the alignment is right.

When I'm working with a Singapore engineer thinking about US startups, the first conversation is almost never about visa or salary. It's about which kind of company they should actually be aiming at. That conversation usually re-orients the entire search.

The failure mode I've seen most often, and who shouldn't make this bet

I'd be lying if I told you this works for everyone. It doesn't. Here is the failure mode I've seen most often, and the kind of person it tends to happen to.

The failure mode is roughly this: candidate accepts an offer, moves to San Francisco or New York, hits the first quarter, finds the pace and ambiguity overwhelming, becomes increasingly frustrated, isolates from their colleagues, doesn't make local friends, starts counting the months until they can return, and either quits before the year is out or limps through to a forced exit. The visa unwinds. The candidate returns to Singapore feeling like they failed. The reality is usually that the alignment was wrong from the start — but it's hard to see that when you're in the middle of it.

The candidates this happens to share some patterns. They are usually people who made the move because someone else thought they should — a partner pushing for it, a mentor encouraging them, an external narrative they felt they needed to live up to. Their internal yes was weaker than their external yes. The friction of the first three months is enough to expose that gap.

If you're considering this bet because you genuinely want it — because you've felt the pull of this for years, because you read US tech writing and feel a kind of envy that won't quiet down, because you've outgrown what your current role can offer you and you know it — you'll be fine. The friction will hurt and the first six months will be hard, but you'll come out the other side stronger.

If you're considering this bet because you feel you should want it — because everyone else is talking about it, because your LinkedIn feed is full of it, because it sounds like the prestigious thing to do — please don't. The cost of doing the right thing for the wrong reason is much higher than the cost of staying put.

If yes — here's how the mechanism actually works

Once you've decided you want this, the question shifts from "should I?" to "how?"

For Singapore citizens, the actual mechanism is unusually clean and very few candidates know about it. You don't enter the H-1B lottery. You don't wait for a March registration window. You don't compete with the 200,000-plus Indian engineers fighting for 85,000 slots. You apply through the H-1B1 visa pathway — a treaty visa created by the 2003 US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, available exclusively to Singapore citizens (and Chileans). The annual quota is 5,400. It has never been hit. You can apply year-round, at the US embassy in Singapore, with a turnaround of 6 to 10 weeks once you have an offer in hand.

This is the part of the conversation that changes the most expressions in the room. Most Singapore engineers I talk to assume getting to the US is a bureaucratic gauntlet of indeterminate length and low probability. It's not. It's a defined pathway with a defined timeline that you, as a Singapore citizen, have an unfair advantage on.

What this means in practice: a realistic estimate, drawn from hiring market patterns rather than a placement track record, is that from the day you decide to start looking you can expect to be in San Francisco or New York within 4 to 6 months. That breaks down into 8 to 14 weeks of outreach to land an offer, 6 to 10 weeks for visa processing, plus the time to wind down your Singapore role and physically move. It's not 18 months. It's not "let's see if I get lucky in the lottery." It's a project you can plan around like any other major life decision.

The work that actually matters is upstream of the visa. Building a target list of companies that fit your stage and discipline. Finding the right people inside those companies (this is rarely a job-board problem, despite what job boards tell you). Writing outreach that actually gets opened. Running interview loops that surface the alignment questions, not just the technical ones. Negotiating offers that capture the equity you're entitled to. This is most of the work, and it's the part most candidates underestimate when they try to do this alone.

What I tell every Singapore engineer who DMs me

The last time I job-hunted seriously, I did what everyone does. Doomscrolling on LinkedIn. Applied via job portals. Took recruiter calls. Refreshed my inbox. Rinse and repeat. The process hasn't meaningfully changed in over a decade — even as everything around it has.

That's the thing I want to leave you with. The hardest part of betting on a US startup as a Singapore engineer is not the visa, not the salary negotiation, not the cultural adjustment, not the family conversation. The hardest part is treating this as a real project with a real plan instead of a passive job hunt that happens to be in a different country.

The candidates who land good outcomes do not browse job boards and hope. They define what they want. They identify the 30 to 50 companies that fit. They figure out who inside those companies they need to talk to. They write outreach that gets responses. They run their interview loops with intention. They negotiate. They land. Then they ship.

I do this work end-to-end with a small number of people each year. If you've read this far and you're seriously thinking about whether this bet is yours to make, the form is here. Tell me where you are, what you're optimising for, and what's been holding you back. I read everything.

The thing nobody tells you about being a Singaporean in your twenties or thirties looking at the US startup ecosystem is that nobody is going to give you permission. There's no scholarship for this. No government rotation. No GLC pathway. No parental endorsement waiting on the other side. The only way it happens is that one day you decide you're doing it, and then you do the work to make it real.

The bet is more available to you than to almost any other engineer in the world. The visa is yours by treaty. The market wants what you can do. The downside, if you've been honest with yourself about why you're going, is small and recoverable.

The only question left is whether you ever ask it.