G'Day from Sydney

Anduril have setup shop in Sydney. Anything of interest there?

Westbury Partners if you are into high frequency trading. They pay a shit tonne (seemed to have stopped displaying the eye watering salaries)

The main reason most openings are "Remote, US-only" is due to tax and labor laws.

By employing you, the US company must comply with all Australian tax and labor laws (in addition to the US laws). This is a huge burden. (Like the company must calculate and report how much revenue was generated through your work and pay Australian corporate income tax.)

Your best chance is to apply to US companies that already operate in Australia: they will have the necessary legal/HR infra set up. (For example Google probably has an office in Australia.)

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Another method may be to work as a contractor through a service like https://www.toptal.com (or even on your own if you can find contracts).

Remote roles mean you're not just competing with other Americans, but the rest of the world, which likely means a lot lower pay.

Also seems like Aus/US have barely any work hour overlap, what's your plan there?

It will no doubt be challenging. Some US companies have offices in Australia. Many others hire only in the US or maybe also in one or two other countries. This is usually to do with labor law differences and the difficulty of keeping up with tax obligations in multiple jurisdictions for just one or two new employees.

One thing I’ve seen multiple companies do is hire people overseas as contractors. Sometimes they’ll do it as independent contractors. Sometimes they’ll only do it as a company-to-company contract, but in countries where it’s easy to set up a corporation or other type of business of some kind that can be a company consisting of a single employer/owner.

If you’re interested in deep support roles like an SRE/Platform engineer, being in another country in another timezone can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. I keep telling my boss that my next hire I’d like to be in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, or so for clock coverage. If you’re looking for more traditional application development, the clock can be a tricker thing.

You might end up working for a US company but spend most of your time with other overseas people closer to your time zone. You might end up working unusual hours for your type of work to coordinate with US staff. If you’re lucky and you enjoy a more asynchronous form of collaboration than Slack messages and Zoom calls, there are some teams and even some companies that do work that way.

You have access to the E3 visa - why not move here?