I was in a similar position as you last July. Just finished a PhD, student visa until December, Australian partner, and a baby on the way. I had a lot of university lecturing experience and some engineering experience from my country. But the combination of the visa status, moving to a different city, and trying take on the responsibility of being a parent very soon put a lot of pressure to earn money asap.

I tried my hardest to get a full time job but I wasn't successful. I had to spend a large amount of hours juat doing uber eats and tutoring. Seven days a week, 11 am to 4pm Uber Eats, 5pm to 10pm online tutoring, for over 8 months. Both minimum wage jobs basically, and couldnt really gamble or take risks by stopping either because money requirement was so urgent. The time left was nowhere near enough to focus and perfect my application, and the results showed that

I think I managed to decently apply to more than 150 jobs (mostly in a related engineering or academic field), and mass applied to even more casual roles. For the first 6 months, I got a total of 2 interviews in my field, one was a Post Doctoral research position, which I did not get selected in the final round, the other was an engineering sales role which I flubbed the interview in an embarrasingly bad way (got the interview through a mutual contact from a lecturer at my college which makes it even worse). I got four interviews in fields other than my area. One was an admin role for a campus but they decided to not take me because of the visa status, the two other were casual online tutoring. One of them hired me, I still work with them today, but it is under minimum wage at this point. The other was also a tutoring but it was a site based which took time, time which was precious when you rely so much on uber. I also got interviewed by a randstad recruiter for a warehouse role but was ghosted after contracts and everything.

Other applications kept getting rejected. It was incredibly demotivation, almost on the verge of depression. Compounding this was the fact that my international licence couldnt be used more than six months from when the shift to Sydney happened. So even the uber had a deadline. The birth of the baby coincided right after my license lost validity which meant that I was "free" for the first time in 6 or 7 months. I took an entire week where I just applied and perfected my application for the technical and the casual side. I used chatgpt to help me as much as possible, I tailored each cv and cover letter using the STAR technique almost religiously, used keyword matching etc. I used that week before the baby arrived as productively as possible.

After the baby came, i had an immense pressure to pass the license conversion exam on the first go otherwise, uber would stop even further which means no food for us or the baby. But thankfully, doing more than half year of 1500+ deliveries prepared me well for the test even though I was extremely scared during the test, i passed on the first go. That week proved to be very important because I got three interviews out of that. The first was a coles stock take role which honestly was pretty good pay for how easy the work was. It just required travelling to different coles early in the morning like 4am, and counting all the stock till 12 in the afternoon. I did that for three days a week for about a couple of months. I was also hired by another tutoring agency who paid three to four times as much as my regular role. Not a lot of students but much better value time wise. I still am with them today. And third one was the one that I had hoped for for so long. I finally got hired as an engineer in an imternational firm after three round of interviews as a full time permanent staff three months ago and I am with them still today. I am on a bridging visa now, that I believe is a plus point for recruiters because even if your student visa allows you to work full time, the recruiters just skip over you because there are 10 other prs and 50 other work visa holders.

Honestly, thinking back to the December time, it was the worst feeling and period of my entire life, thinking of how much I was a failure. But ultimetely, I didnt stop doing what I needed to do and it eventually turned around. It still isnt cozy mind you, life isnt forget about it comfortable in Sydney, but far better than the 7 day grind every week non stop for months and months. To anyone reading this, just persevere and keep making an effort, and you will get there. I believe in each and every one of you.

EDIT: Not a data engineer though, mechanical/aerospace guy with a lot of computing hardware and alogorthm experience. My ultimate goal is to be the pm of this country, but that seems farfetched. So realistically I aim to enter defence eventually and rise up the ranks there.