Software Engineer, Backend Architecture

📍 Tokyo, Japan or 🌎 Remote

🏢 Mercari

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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

Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people

"What can I do to help society thrive with the finite resources we have?" The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them. Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential.For more information about Mercari Group’s mission, see Mercari's Culture Doc.

Equal Opportunity Hiring

Here at Mercari, we work to realize a world in which no one’s potential is limited by their background and everyone has the opportunity to freely create value. We also firmly believe that a mindset of Diversity & Inclusion is essential for us to achieve our mission.
This, of course, extends to our hiring practices as well. Mercari is committed to eliminating discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, physical disability, and other such factors so that anyone who shares our mission and values can join us, regardless of their background. For more details, please read our D&I Statement.

Team's Mission / Work Responsibilities

Team mission:

Unleash BE teams’ potential: to support backend teams in building product features by providing robust architectural guidance and tackling complex problems and performance issues. We strive to be BE teams’ reliable partners, enabling them to focus on delivering high-quality software and enhancing the overall user experience
Drive re-architecture and FinOps: We are committed to developing short and mid-term plans for rearchitecting our systems, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and cost optimization. By adopting efficient FinOps practices, we aim to optimize resource allocation and maximize cost-effectiveness, enabling the organization to achieve its business objectives effectively
Build a platform as a service: Our long-term mission is to establish a scalable and future-proof platform as a service (PaaS) working side-by-side with platform and SRE teams. By creating a robust foundation and leveraging modern technologies, we aim to provide a comprehensive and extensible platform that empowers the development teams to rapidly build, deploy, and scale their applications, driving innovation and efficiency across the organization

Background:

As Mercari's user base continues to grow rapidly, reaching approximately 21 million active users, and as our platform expands to include new lines of businesses, it is imperative that our backend architecture remains highly resilient and adaptable in order to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Providing a robust and extensible support system for our users and new business ventures is paramount to our continued success
The Backend Architects team serves as the driving force behind Mercari's marketplace architecture, playing a crucial role in providing cutting-edge design and architecture solutions to support the company's ongoing expansion. Their responsibility lies in empowering and enabling all of Mercari's backend teams with the latest and most advanced architecture designs to support our rapid growth
As a backend architect in the team, you will support different high priority and high impact projects across different areas in the marketplace, providing the proper guidance, tackling complex problems and performance issues, and make sure that BE teams’ are on the right track
You will be part of the short-term, mid-term, and long-term plans for FinOps activities and cost optimization, and provide the comprehensive and extensible framework that empowers the development teams

Specific work responsibilities include the following:

Design the overall architecture and roadmap for Mercari’s backend systems
Design and implement common middlewares and core microservices
Work with the Platform and SRE team to provide a robust microservices platform
Work across multiple backend teams to help design, build, and evolve microservices
Help form a healthy organization structure, define guidelines on service development, testing, deploy and monitoring to the whole engineering organization
Help build and push forward the plans for FinOps initiatives, and the overall BE framework

Unique and Bold Challenges

You will be able to play an active role in our architecture team across the whole of Mercari in various business-impacting areas, and partake in our journey of unleashing Mercari’s backend engineers’ full potential
The backend architecture team at Mercari enables you to tackle the potential challenges of our products in order to create both a collaborative and comprehensive environment for our service. You will gain deep insight into further empowering our products, and have the opportunity to work on large-scale platforms that act as essential support to the entire organization
You will work in a super diverse team, along with members coming from different countries to support teams who use both Japanese and English

Your qualification

Required Qualifications

Shared understanding and belief in Mercari Group's mission and values
Strong programming skills
Experience building scalable and robust API
Experience with SOA or microservices architecture design
Good documentation and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with Golang
Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases
Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
Good understanding of cloud-native applications and infrastructure, especially GCP
Demonstrated skills in leading projects across multiple teams

Language Requirements

English: Independent (CEFR - B2)
Japanese: Basic (CEFR - A2) optional
* For details about CEFR, see here

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
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