Building for the World From Jaipur
Nine years of work for US clients, done from a city nobody in that industry thinks about. On distance, timezones, and staying put.
Almost all of my professional work has been for clients elsewhere — a pharmaceutical research company in the US, a distributor network in North America — and effectively all of it has been done from Jaipur.
That's unremarkable now. It wasn't obviously going to be, and the received advice for most of my career was that you move to where the work is: Bangalore, Pune, Gurgaon, or out of the country entirely.
I stayed. It's worked out, and I think the reasons are more specific than "remote work happened."
Distance stops mattering when the record is good
The thing that makes remote work across ten and a half time zones survivable is not overlapping hours. It's that decisions are written down.
When you can't lean over and ask, you learn to leave a trail — why this was built this way, what was considered and rejected, what the constraint actually was. I picked that habit up out of necessity and it turned out to be the single most valuable engineering practice I have. The audit trail I'm proudest of building for a client is, in a sense, the same instinct applied to their data.
Teams that share a room can get away with keeping decisions in their heads. It catches up with them later, usually when the person holding the context leaves.
The timezone is a feature if you let it
IST against US hours gives you a long stretch of the day where nobody can interrupt you, followed by a short window where everything gets resolved at once.
That shape suits the work I do. Deep architectural work needs uninterrupted hours far more than it needs availability. The trick is being genuinely present in the overlap — properly available, properly prepared — rather than treating it as an inconvenience at the end of the day.
Staying put
There's a version of this career where I moved somewhere with more of an industry around it, and I'd probably have earned more sooner.
What staying gave me was continuity — the same platform for years, the same client relationship deepening rather than resetting, and a life that doesn't disassemble every time work changes. My family is here. The roads I ride to think are an hour away. I've watched a number of talented people optimise hard for proximity to opportunity and end up with a career that looks impressive and a life that got postponed.
The work found its way here. It usually does now, and I'd make the same choice again.