>I'm also definitely open to working with larger orgs, but in my experience, they are less likely to be open to the part-time consulting option.

We're a tiny, boutique, consultancy specialized in machine learning. We pretty much exclusively work with large organizations in diverse sectors and industries and for a variety of functions. We work on projects, and we build custom products for them, and that requires deep dives into the domains in question. It's doable.

>My question is: where do I look? Most job boards are FTE only, and the consulting business seems to rely a lot on "I know a guy who could help with this." type references.

Yes. I doubt anything we have worked on was posted anywhere. It mostly was meeting executives at an organization, and then working with them and their people. I think one additional reason is that they didn't really want to advertise the direction they were taking. Even with certain entities in some countries that are required to go through a public tender process to select a partner, they can do a restricted tender and get you on a shortlist so it doesn't take forever to happen. Therefore, you are right. Networking, connections, referrals. It never hurts to consistently deliver, and have recommendation letters from organizations you've worked with.

>I'm located in VA, USA, so I'm a long ways away from the typical Silicon Valley startup scene, although we do have a nice little niche here where I am.

Team in Algiers, Algeria. We have a couple of people in Paris, France for business purposes (lead generation and customer development). Our clients are mostly in Europe, none in Algeria, because there are no companies of a size we are used to deal with.

Back to your question: "How to find remote, part-time DevOps consulting positions?". One very effective way is what I call meta-consulting, or "consulswing", or a "gravitational slingshot" [oh, these consultants and their douchey names]: your consulting company "A" does DevOps for consulting company "B" in another field. They like you so much that they'll get you to do DevOps for their clients "C", "D", "E", etc.

It is not required that you do DevOps for "B" to begin with, but in my experience, people tend to be more enthusiastic talking about you when you've done good work for them.

I replied[0] to a similar thread a few days ago. As per my answer, we have gone through quite the experience curve and refined our processes doing ML projects over the years, then we built our machine learning platform[1] to be able to do ML work more effectively and consistently. Why does this matter? It matters because if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have been in a position to even accept more clients unless we scaled by adding more people, and then that would be our fixed cost that would oblige us to keep doing projects to pay them, or let them go.

As someone who has been a turnaround person[2], the first thing we did when the dust settled was to build our platform so we wouldn't live through the Christian Bale's weight yo-yo/swing equivalent.

All the best,

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179224

- [1]: https://iko.ai

- [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26182988