This study examines politeness strategies in hand written teaching job applications. The job application letters were submitted to two academic institutions: British College and Leadership Anglo-Saxon Academic Complex (LAAC) Febe, for the 2025-2026 academic year by Cameroonian applicants to Anglophone institutions. Using Brown and Levinson's framework, it analyzes how positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record politeness, and bald on-record politeness are deployed and how they construct professional identities cross-culturally, a rich area where pragmatics meets professional communication. The corpus of twenty letters reveals significant pragmatic variation. While negative politeness elements appear universally as a baseline, each letter exhibits a distinct dominant orientation: positive politeness emphasizes solidarity and institutional alignment; negative politeness marked by extreme deference and self- effacement; off-record politeness characterized by indirectness and affective ambiguity; and bald on-record politeness demonstrating direct, evidence-based self-presentation. The study further examines how applicants "do" face work to construct identities of competence, modesty, and respectability. Competence is performed through factual credential listing or capability framed as institutional service. Modesty is achieved through explicit self-effacement. Loyalty is enacted through contractual promises or distributed institutional alignment. Respectability is constructed through honorific accumulation and genre mastery. The findings contribute to cross-cultural pragmatics by showing that politeness in letter writing contexts is not universally the same but standardize across different cultures. Writers navigate local high-deference norms, British format, American globalized rhetoric, and institutional readings simultaneously. The same strategies can be face-threatening depending on standard accuracy. These results have implications for inter-language pragmatics and cross-cultural communication.