Moving to Germany as a Software Engineer (Part 2)

What options are available for a Software Engineer?

4 min readJan 22

A traveller at airport, looking at the plane, that just took off. — Photo by yousef alfuhigi on Unsplash

This is my first series of stories, that I decided to share with a wider audience. In this series, I am sharing stories about my learning experience about “How I moved to Germany as a Software Engineer?” For simplicity and your valuable time, I have divided this into multiple parts. Links are at the end. Links are at the bottom.

Well, Germany provides multiple options for different categories of employees to move with Work Visa, Blue Card, Job Seeker Visa or Student Visa. Blue card visas and Job Seeker visas are the easiest way to move to Germany for working professionals.

Blue Card Visa

Blue card visa is for qualified academic professionals in IT, Engineering, or Medical. So it's quite simple and straightforward, if you are a qualified person, you can easily get a job and your employer will sponsor your blue card visa. A Blue Card visa is always tied to your employer.

So the employer tells the German government, for a job like AWS Cloud Architect, “we did not find a person in Germany with such a skill, we would like to invite this guy from that country to work with us”. That is it. Once you get a job offer from your employer, the rest of the visa process and documentation fall in place, because they need you (but they are very choosy and specific about the job role and your profile).

Job Seeker Visa

This is another visa, that is normally valid for 6 months, based on your education, skills, and profession. Germany allows you to come here and look for a job. And if you find the job within 6 months, your Job Seeker visa will get converted into Work Permit or Blue Card.

Personally, I think, this is a bit more challenging, you will need more capitals to live in Germany for the time being. Also if you are working in India, you need to leave that work too (some people managed to do that because of the work-from-home setup, depends on the situation whether your company allowed it or not, or how you managed to do that in a hacky way. it depends)