Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering

About Mercari

We believe the world needs a place where people can exchange their loved goods. That’s why we built Mercari—to connect people who want to buy and sell things of emotional value through their mobile phones. Mercari has grown to become a leading community-powered marketplace that brings together millions of people every day.

Mercari Dev Meetups

Position

Our Mission

Mercari is a Japan-based company with the mission of “create value in a global marketplace where anyone can buy & sell.” Having continuously worked toward this goal since our founding in 2013, we are now transforming from a startup into a global player. While this transformation brings its own specific set of challenges, we believe that solving them one after another will allow us to fully achieve our mission. Are you interested in working together to take on these exciting challenges?

Our Culture

Mercari’s culture has been central to the company since our founding, with the three core values of Go Bold, All for One, and Be a Pro. In addition, the “Trust & Openness” value was introduced to embody our culture of mutual trust, where information remains transparent and rules are kept to a minimum. Regardless of how big Mercari gets, our culture is essential to achieving our mission and will be promoted throughout our organization.

Position Overview

Team

Platform Group is responsible for helping engineers at Mercari and its subsidiaries to build and deliver better products to our customers. We provide infrastructure and developer experience and make the service more reliable and engineer’s work easier.

Currently, the Platform group consists of four teams: 

• Platform DX: Working on improving the developers experience by providing better abstraction and automated workflows
• CI/CD: Providing testing infrastructure, toolings, and the delivery system to make service delivery faster and more reliable
• Network: Responsible for end-to-end network infrastructure from the edge (CDN) to the cloud & service mesh (Istio) and physical data centers
• Platform Infra: Working on the base infrastructure operations as the cloud (GCP & AWS) and Kubernetes admin, as well as building the observability platform

You can see more details about the team structure on our tech blog How we reorganize the platform team.

Recent or in-progress projects

The following are some of the recent or in-progress projects which Platform Group has been working on:

• Platform DX
  • Kubernetes Configuration Management with CUE
  • Shifting to Zero Touch Production
• CI/CD
  • Towards a more stable and secure CD system replacement
  • Defense Against Novel Threats: Redesigning CI at Mercari
• Network
  • How Istio solved our problems
  • Managing Network Policies for namespaces isolation on a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster
  • Dynamic Service Routing using Istio
• Platform Infra
  • Securing Terraform monorepo CI
  • Observability-kit: Adventures of using CUE at scale

Role

We are looking for an engineering manager of one of the teams in the Platform group, who has a strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development. Someone who can commit to increasing the team’s outcomes by envisioning the long-term goal and roadmap which is aligned with organizational goals, supporting the career growth of the members and scaling of the team by hiring, and improving the process.

What you will do

• Envision long-term goal and roadmap of platform improvements and execute
• Propose the strategies to solve the organizational wide infrastructure problems
• Manage process to help the team do its best job
• Handle goal setting and evaluations for engineer growth each quarter
• Hold 1on1 with direct reports for regular communication and feedback
• Assign projects and roles to engineers by considering future career growth
• Recruit great engineers

Unique and Bold Challenges

Since the platform and its toolings are used by not only Mercari JP but also Merpay and Mercari US, the changes and improvements can affect the whole organization performance from development agility to system reliability. As an engineering manager of the team, you can lead and support the team to have such a large impact. As the base infrastructure team, the team has lots of stakeholders. While listening to the requests from them and taking care of the system's reliability and maintainability, you need to make lots of decisions that can impact long-term but are very challenging.

Your qualification

• Shared belief in Mercari’s mission and values
• Experience of infrastructure management and automation
• Experience of management
• Experience of platform development and operation
• Experience of system architecture design
• Experience working on projects across teams

Preferred Experience

• Experience of distributed system or microservices architecture
• Experience making technical decisions as a tech lead
• Experience hiring engineers (screening applications, interviewing, direct recruiting, hosting events, etc.)

Screening Criteria

• Strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development
• Desire to learn new technologies
• Capability of understanding project priorities and assigning engineers appropriately
• Capability of understanding individual engineer’s motivations and encouraging both their personal growth and that of the business
• Strong communication skill to solve organizational problems
  *Check here for more details

Language Requirements

• English: Proficient (CEFR - C1)
• Japanese: Independent (CEFR - B2) preferred
  *Click here for more information about CEFR

What we offer

• Complete health and social insurance
• Incentive program
• Support systems, including those that benefit employee family members
• Language learning support
• Translation/interpretation support
  *See this page for details 

Support

• Relocation Support
  *See this page for details

Additional details

Related Articles

• Istio is a long wild river: how to navigate it safely
• Mercari's Shintaro Yamada discusses what makes a truly strong “organization and person“
• Mercari CEO Yamada, CTO Namura, and Merpay CTO Sogawa look back at past decisions and their background [Part 1]
• Mercari CEO Yamada, CTO Namura, and Merpay CTO Sogawa envision a future of challenges [Part 2]

Working Conditions

Employment Status

Full-time

• Probationary period: First 3 months after joining the company. (During this period your contract conditions will be the same as that of a permanent employee.)

Office

Roppongi

• Smoking is prohibited within our offices
• Mercari has introduced a work style policy called “Your Choice.” Each member is free to choose whether they want to work in the office or work fully remote. *Exceptions made for certain kinds of work

Work Hours

• Scheduled working hours: 10 AM – 7 PM
• Currently, due to COVID-19 pandemic, we have introduced a full-flex system without core time to increase the choice of working hours and allow for more flexible working styles. (*does not apply to all positions)

Holidays

• Two days off per week (as well as national holidays, New Year's break, etc.)
• Paid leave, congratulatory and bereavement leave, relax days, sick leave

Salary

• Annual salary paid in 12 monthly installments (including fixed overtime allowance)
• Based on skills, experience, and abilities
• Reviewed twice a year

Media

Corporate Sites

• Mercari, Inc.
• Merpay, Inc. [Japanese]
• Souzoh, Inc.
• Mercoin, Inc. [Japanese]
• Mercari US

Owned Media

• Mercari Careers
• Mercari Engineering Portal
• Mercan - Introduces the people that make Mercari
• Mercari US Careers
• Mercari US Blog