1) How did you get started? Is it feasible for more junior engineers to get into it or not so much?
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
I would say it's not so feasable as a junior unless you really can hit the ground running which only comes with experience, at least in ops. Most clients expect me to be productive within about a week of landing if not less, otherwise they would have found a permie. They also expect senior freelance people in such a space to be making or helping to make a lot of decisions for them, which is hard to do until you've made enough mistakes to learn what not to do, instead of just knowing the latest doo-daa or other.
Finding work isn't hard, you register with a few agencies (e.g hays, linuxrecruit, etc etc and then they farm your CV out to their clients, and then you interview and start working.. I've never spent more than a week looking for a new contract)
As for the amount of work -- endless, at least in devops...
Currently I am working as a senior devops/sre for a startup, k8s, cloudy stuff, big springboot stack (50 or so services across 10 instances, etc) -- I do the same work as the full time staff, mgt treats me as slightly more senior/more votes than those because I am really, but you have to walk a bit of a political line sometimes.
Any questions feel free :}
Have you considered relocating to the US?
I'm a devops contractor in the UK and looking at options to maximize income.
Nah, quality of life wouldn't be there for me, personally.
London is still probably highest rates for devops in the EU, Munich/Frankfurt/Amterdam/Paris aren't far behind but the work is more boring, Berlin rates are less but everything is quite cheap..
I'm not a digital nomad, have a house and a child :}
No anxiety really, just keep some money set aside and after some years you sort of know if you'll be able to easily find a job or not.
In the absolute worst case, if I couldn't get another contract, I could always go perm, but I've not had to make such a decision yet.
I got started with a combination of crappy freelance websites (I found some small assignments on elance etc), reddit/r/freelance, and had some small jobs for friends and previous employees. After that I found a great gig on Hacker News's "Seeking Freelancer" forum. Then I moved into longer term onsite contracts, hourly rates are a bit less flexible but you have more security and a more stable turnover.
2) How do you find work consistently enough to make a living? What does the work often look like?
As I said -- longer term contracts give you stability here. Other freelancers go for more lucrative short-term projects. There's lots of combinations. My first project was like 3 weeks, and I've been at my current assignment for almost 3 years now.