I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer something I always wanted to do.<p>The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks.<p>Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that.<p>Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.