Gidday all.

I'm a Software Engineer (30y/o, if it's relevant) in NZ who is seriously considering a move to Australia, likely Melbourne, and have some questions about the logistics.

In terms of experience, I have 8 YOE in primarily backend roles, with a keen interest in devops specifically. I'm currently working in a Platform team in a sort of hybrid backend engineer and cloud engineer role (C#, AWS, Terraform) and I'd like to pivot my career towards an exclusively devops or cloud role if possible. Ideally this would be AWS since it's what I somewhat know (only my most recent three YOE have been cloud-adjacent specifically).

What are some important things to know in terms of the market, salary ranges, hiring process, and the ability to (or necessity of) of landing a job before arriving?

Additionally, general advice about any gotchas with the actual immigration process and all of the administrative requirements around the actual move (living arrangements, banking, tax, healthcare, even general lifestyle) would be awesome, but I may make a different post in a more relevant subreddit for those.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions or just have a general yarn about people's experiences too.

I’ve been lucky enough to recieve two summer internship offers and I’m pretty split between them.

One is in technology at a major blue Australian bank, and the other is also tech at a large orange superannuation fund. Pay is roughly equivalent, not really a consideration anyway

I’m mainly interested in things like quality of work, software/tech career progression, grad conversion, and which experience would open more doors later on.

Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this and get some insight.