Engineering Manager, Platform Group

Tokyo, Japan

Mercari

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Temporary housing

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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.

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Position

Remote work is also possible.

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.

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 4 teams: Platform DX, CI/CD, Network and Platform infra. Platform DX is working on improving the developer experience. CI/CD is providing testing infrastructure, toolings, and the delivery system. Network is responsible for edge, Cloud, and data center networking. Platform infra is working on base Cloud management and observability tooling. By working with multiple layers of teams, we achieve the mission of the Platform group.

Recent or in-progress projects

The following is some of the recent or in-progress projects which Platform group is working on:

Provide a temporary role granting system for Kubernetes RBAC and Google Cloud Platform IAM. This allows developers and SRE not to have modification roles by default and get it only when required. With it, we move forward to Zero touch production and make the platform more secure (Platform DX)
Provide Kubernetes abstraction framework. Currently, developers need to handle the wall of YAML to deploy services. With this framework, we abstract many fundamental configurations away from developers' hands and reduce the cost of deploying new services (Platform DX)
Introduce Istio service mesh and working on from stabilization to supporting gradual adoption to 100+ microservices (See more details on talk at IstioCon) (Network)
Provide canary delivery pipelines on Spinnaker by leveraging the Istio feature provided by the Network team. The pipeline can be defined by the code and make it easy to generate and change by pull request (CI/CD)
Provide secure CI systems for automated infrastructure continuous delivery. We have terraform monorepo which manages different team’s service infrastructure. Before CI was executed by a single strong account, which has huge risk if leaked, but now it’s executed with delegated least privileged account for each team (Platform infra)
Migrate from zonal and routes-based Kubernetes cluster to regional and VPC-native Kuberntes cluster without any downtime and with less impacts on the product development. This cluster is our main multi-tenant cluster which runs 100+ microservices and receives 80,000+ req/sec (See more details on our engineering blog)

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

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 platform development and operation
Experience of system architecture design
Experience of management
Experience working on projects across teams

Will be a plus

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

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 Location

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