As someone who worked remote for about two years I feel like you have less impact on the overall direction of the services you work on. At least unless your company is embracing remote work and make sacrifices to support it. Lot of information exchange happens casually, between a cup of coffee, in the office. It's hard to make up for that in infrastructure and processes in remote work.
That's a management issue. If the correct remote work processes are in place things like this are easy to overcome. It also helps when 90%+ of your company is remote.
I agree though, remote work only works if your company is full on remote (culture, comms, hr, etc).
As someone else replied, contacts, friends and old colleagues. I got my first remote job by going to the local Ruby user group and getting to know people.
I found remote work through old work contracts. People that trust me to do a good job regardless of where I am. It is difficult for companies to give people that trust, so it is all about helping them to find that trust and then not letting then down.