Sho’s Long Toronto Search—and the Exchange That Finally Said Yes

When Sho reached out to Frog in early 2024, he already knew the city’s streets. As a Hosei University economics student he had once taken a two-year leave, spent a short winter in Toronto expecting to become fluent in two months, and discovered how little textbook English helped in real conversation. He came back for a full year of study, then returned to Japan to finish school—but the idea of working abroad never left.

He did not start as an engineer on paper. Student internships leaned toward marketing and business development. Near graduation he taught himself JavaScript, completed a three-month bootcamp focused on Ruby on Rails, and joined Enigmo, the company behind BUYMA, as a new-grad engineer. Over roughly four years he worked on the C2C fashion marketplace’s platform and later on CRM systems. Wanting more flexibility for graduate study, he freelanced about two years—often three or four days a week—while pursuing an online master’s in finance and blockchain at the University of Nicosia, with degree issuance pending around January 2025 at the time of the interview.

Canada’s pull was practical as well as personal. Australia’s working-holiday rules looked too short for tech employment. Toronto felt familiar. He timed the move after watching the pandemic carefully and arrived in February 2024 on a working holiday, introduced to Frog through Pan, another member who had already made the leap. Early optimism came from 2022–2023 success stories; a data-analyst friend at a Canadian bank warned him the market was brutal, and Sho shrugged it off—until applications and study-group conversations proved the friend right.

He applied steadily as the visa clock ticked. In total he sent roughly 192 applications: about 104 rejections, 87 with no reply, and only a thin slice that reached interviews. He had built stamina earlier hunting Singapore internships with around a hundred applications for one or two replies. From about June he began seriously considering an RO working-holiday path tied to French-language study as runway. Interview volume, he noticed, rose around August without a dramatic change in how he applied—more a seasonal and market shift than a new tactic.

The company that hired him, the Canadian Securities Exchange, sits behind TSX in Canada’s exchange landscape and serves a smaller, mid-market listing niche. The firm is about eighty people with roughly five engineers. Sho builds applications for listed companies and, on the project he described, owns frontend, backend, and server work in a small team that borrows scrum ideas without corporate ceremony. Work is hybrid; living nearby, he is usually in the office. Security reviews are slower than freelance life, which he accepts as finance-sector reality.

About five months in at interview time, he also held RO working-holiday status for a French course that had not yet started. The story he leaves for other engineers is less a checklist than a correction: even with years of Japan product experience, Toronto can demand volume, patience, and a Plan B on immigration while you wait for the market to open.

He is clear-eyed about what the search taught him. Japan hiring instincts do not map cleanly onto Toronto inboxes; silence is common; and even strong IC years cannot cancel a soft market. The French-course RO path sits beside the CSE badge as unfinished business—another runway choice made while the working-holiday clock was already moving.