Imai Mapped a Path from IBM Japan to Amazon Canada—Then to Seattle on Day-One Intent

Ryo Imai earned an Amazon Canada offer while living in Japan, moved to Vancouver, and later transferred toward Seattle Amazon—an internal hop that sounds simple on a map and is anything but. The interview traces how he stacked steps when luck and timing refused to cooperate.

Overseas ambition started in university. Electrical and electronic engineering fit his degree; programming fit him better. A book on engineers at the world frontier made U.S. software work feel real. Budget blocked overseas graduate school; impulsively he spent a month in San Francisco, stepped onto Google’s campus, and quietly marked America as the place to aim. He joined IBM Japan because foreign firms with transfer paths were scarce for software engineers; IBM’s posting did not demand classic CS credentials the way he expected.

Five years there meant cloud AI APIs—send a PDF, get a summary—on a team roughly seventy percent U.S., thirty percent Japan, English in docs and GitHub. He kept applying for internal transfers, learning that jumping into unrelated U.S. orgs was nearly hopeless; deepening ties with the same department’s American colleagues raised odds. A near-miss collapsed under COVID. Sales transfers supporting Japanese clients’ U.S. branches happened; engineering justification was rarer. He kept stating the goal aloud so opportunity had somewhere to land.

When transfer stalled and a team change dulled the work, he looked abroad—Canada, Germany, anywhere workable, knowing U.S. visas from Japan were brutal. A LinkedIn recruiter dangled Amazon Canada with relocation support. Loops were few but long: five to six hours of one-hour interviews. Infrastructure and DevOps were his strength; he first interviewed as a software engineer, then shifted into a DevOps-seeking team. Scheduling across timezones stretched the process—about two months of interviews plus three months to travel, roughly five months total in a hot 2022 market.

Amazon’s ownership culture hit harder than language alone: back-to-back meetings without Japan-style prep, teams owning microservices from infra through ops and incidents, leaders who delegate instead of micromanage. He is a System Development Engineer (SysDE)—closer to DevOps/SRE than the SDE majority—building infra, automation, and operational improvements alongside software.

On day one he noticed nearly every teammate sat in Seattle and thought himself lucky. L-1 internal transfer needs at least a year in company; specialty knowledge helps justify bringing someone across. Vancouver teams often branch from Seattle hubs, so relationships form naturally—more transfer surface than Amazon Japan, he argues. He kept telling managers he wanted the U.S., secured Canadian permanent residency in under two years despite a boss who preferred more Canadian stability first, then resumed the transfer after PR—positions assembled over following months, no extra interview because he already worked the team. Performance trust was the real currency: become someone the team would miss. Next he wants Intermediate promotion and the persuasion skills that move groups when opinions collide—because polish alone does not raise the level. Build English by using it at work, he adds; OSS and meetups in Japan still count as prep.