From Chile to Montréal

This story begins when I was working for Papinotas as a Staff Software Engineer in Chile. I was responsible for designing scalable architecture and providing technical leadership across multiple teams at a B2B SaaS company in the edtech industry.

A new journey in my career

I still remember that day, in February 2022, when a Senior Technical Recruiter at Altitude Sports (opens in a new tab) approached me on LinkedIn to discuss a new project and role.

Founded in 1984, the Canadian company had since become an online-only retailer, bringing together fashion and the outdoors through premium gear, technical apparel, and expert advice.

The company wanted to move both of its Shopify storefronts to a headless solution and needed to build a strong team of multidisciplinary experts. Several challenges were driving that decision:

• Shopify’s transaction fees were too high for the business to sustain in the long run.
• The storefronts depended heavily on Shopify’s ecosystem and uptime. Outages, technical issues, and unexpected updates that broke existing functionality had sometimes left the company unable to sell anything for entire days.
• Over time, the technical stack had become something of a Frankenstein’s monster: a mix of Liquid templates and Vue.js that required plenty of tinkering to maintain.

After several weeks of interviews, discussions, and a final offer, I joined Altitude Sports in April 2022 as a Software Engineer L3, working remotely from Chile as a consultant.

That is when my Canadian journey really started.

A decision had to be made

I remotely led the team responsible for maintaining the company’s Shopify storefronts. I also worked closely with the Staff Frontend Engineer to explore whether we could migrate to a headless platform that would support multiple brands and give us full control over the architecture, with a flexible design system and custom backend microservices. We were aiming to release the new website in July 2024.

In September 2022, after months of hard work, investigations, performance improvements, team leadership, and several successful projects, the human resources department offered me the opportunity to immigrate to Québec, Canada. It was the first time in my career that I had received such an offer.

At the time, my family and I were well established in Chile. We had built a stable life around a quiet place, a home, a job, family, friends, pets, and projects.

Following that proposal, my wife and I spent weeks talking about what moving to another country would mean:

• What would change for us?
• What would we have to give up to start over?
• How much would it cost, and what requirements would we need to meet?
• What opportunities would it create for our children and for us?
• What if it did not work out?

You know, moving from one country to another, even within the same continent, is neither an easy task nor an easy decision. It means taking a risk and leaving familiar things behind, hoping to build a better, safer life.

In October 2022, I decided to take a short trip to Montréal, Canada. I stayed there for almost three weeks. That was the perfect opportunity for me to finally meet some of my colleagues, the teammates I had been working with 40 hours a week from Chile, behind a computer and a camera (that is when reality hits you in the face!).

I also had the chance to explore the city and discover a place where, as a family, we could live. A place I had heard of so many times in my life. I really liked the sense of safety, the multiculturalism, the urban services, the festivities, and the nature (I did not know about Canadian winter yet (opens in a new tab)).

I came back to Chile, and the decision was made.

🍁