While attending college at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Suras Nayak knew he wanted to leave his hometown of Hyderabad, India, and travel the world.
“When I was growing up, I always had this idea somewhere behind my head that I always wanted to move abroad, but I was a little bit influenced by the Western media. I watch a lot of Hollywood movies ... so I was always influenced and liked the idea of moving to a different country, living there, experiencing how things are like there,” he tells CNBC Make It.
Nayak gained his first experience living abroad when he participated in an exchange program that sent him to China for 45 days as a teenager. And almost a decade later, Nayak got a chance to live abroad when he moved to Dublin, Ireland, in March 2025 to work as a software development engineer at Amazon, where his compensation comes to a projected 122,428 euros (US $144,000) a year.
Growing up, Nayak’s dad was also a software engineer. He introduced Nayak to the field and helped him understand coding and programming, Nayak says.
Nayak landed a six-month internship at Amazon during his senior year of college and joined the company full time upon graduating in 2020, where he received compensation of around 6.8 million Indian rupees (US $75,000) a year. He was working out of Amazon’s Bengaluru office, which is about an hour-long flight south from his hometown.
