[fest]

Well, I don't think there is an easy way- I just walked away from the startup and lived on ramen for a couple of years, doing odd-ball contracts just to afford rent. During that time I learned a lot, essentially by telling prospective customers: "I do not have direct experience in this, but I have a pretty good idea on the involved steps. I am willing to do this as learning experience at a reduced rate". Many did agree, some projects turned out better than others- but eventually I did acquire enough experience to pass interviews at "real" companies.

Past two companies hired me specifically for UAV projects, so my professional experience has been in this field- however, it is so wide, that you can easily branch out:

  * design one-off test hardware for various bench/field tests where an off the shelf solution doesn't fit (custom thrust stand, spring constant measurement jig to determine properties of vibration isolation solutions, simple blackbody for QA to determine if the LWIR payload meets specifications)

  * like physics/control systems? Lot of work on tuning PID controllers, implementing simulators for pure SWEs to not crash your expensive prototypes

  * hmm, it looks like we have excessive vibrations on the frame- whip up a small battery powered, WiFi enabled high-frequency accelerometer logger to dig deeper into it.

[pedrosorio]

How does one get contracting opportunities to deliver projects before being able to pass interviews to get a full time job? Where would on find these opportunities today?

I always assumed it was the other way around (experienced full time engineer becomes a specialized contractor).

[fest]

As much as I hate the word: networking and saying yes when you're in the right time and right place.

You probably won't convince a professional widget manufacturer that you're __the__ person for their embedded needs. But a smaller company, that's dipping their toes into branching out from their core business who need to prototype their idea? A lot easier.