Software Engineer, 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

To achieve our mission at Mercari, our organization and each of our employees share the same values and perspectives. Our individual guidelines for action are defined by our three values: Go Bold, All for One, and Be a Pro. Our organization is also shaped by our four foundations: Sustainability, Diversity & Inclusion, Trust & Openness, and Well-being for Performance. Regardless of how big Mercari gets, the culture will remain essential to achieving our mission and something we want to preserve throughout our organization.

We invite you to read the “Mercari Culture Doc,” which summarizes the behaviors and mindset shared by Mercari and its employees. We continue to build an environment where all of our members of diverse backgrounds are accepted and recognized, and where they can thrive while holding dear Mercari’s culture.

Position Overview

Team

The 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 DevOps toolchains to increase the reliability of the service and make the work of engineers 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 the 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 a software engineer for one of the teams in the Platform Group who has a strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development. Someone who is passionate about increasing developer productivity and has a pragmatic ability to release and migrate features to large-scale systems gradually.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain platform features and toolings which support the entire software development cycle from build to test through to deploy and operate
• Support migration and adoptions of new platform features and toolings
• Improve platform security and reliability with the SRE and Security teams
• Improve and automate daily platform operations and reduce toils
• Communicate with internal developers to understand their needs

You may be a fit if you

• Are passionate about improving developer productivity and experience
• Are passionate about infrastructure automation and building toolings
• Are neutral on the technology itself and can take pragmatic approaches to the issues
• Enjoy advocating for the new tooling and systems, and supporting to use it
• Avoid reinventing the wheel and utilize the existing tooling and ecosystem as much as possible

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’s performance from development agility to system reliability. As a software engineer of the team, your implementation can have a truly significant impact.

The team needs to understand what the developers are struggling with and what is required for the Mercari Group’s product development. With this empathy and collection of requirements, the team prioritizes the problems to solve and decides the solution for them. You can join this decision-making process and propose a pragmatic solution leveraging your knowledge and experience.

Your qualification

Common

• Shared understanding and belief in our company’s mission and values
• Experience in infrastructure and system architecture design
• Experience in infrastructure management and automation
• Experience in writing design docs or proposals and reaching agreements with stakeholders
• Experience in using container management platforms (ex: Kubernetes) in production
• Experience in operating and being the admin of cloud (GCP or AWS) in production
• Good understanding of common software development lifecycle (SDLC)

Platform DX team-specific requirements

• 2 years of experience using Go
• Experience in writing CLI tools and packages in Go

Network team-specific requirements

• Experience working with network proxies such as Envoy/HAProxy/Nginx
• Strong understanding of networking, especially OSI Layer 4 to 7: load balancers, proxies, API gateways, DNS, TLS, and HTTP protocol
• Good understanding of Linux networking
• Working knowledge of cloud and Kubernetes networking

Will be a plus

Common

• Experience in a distributed system or microservices architecture
• Experience developing and supporting tools for internal customers
• Experience making technical decisions as a tech lead
• Experience of working as an SRE
• Experience writing Go (and scripting with bash)

Platform DX team-specific preferred experience

• Experience in frontend development with React
• Experience in interface and UI/UX design

Network team-specific preferred experience

• Experience in using service meshes in production such as Istio or Linkerd
• Experience in using network reliability practices such as circuit breaking, rate limiting
• Experience in designing cloud-based network architectures

Language Requirements

• English: Proficient (CEFR - C1)
• Japanese: Basic (CEFR - A2) optional
  *Click here for more information about CEFR

Related Articles

• Istio is a long wild river: how to navigate it safely
• Mercari Platform Group Tech Talk #1 [Day1]
• Mercari Platform Group Tech Talk #1 [Day2]
• How we reorganize the platform team
• How we recreate and migrate our kubernetes cluster (only available in Japanese)

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

• Full flextime (no core time)
  *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

Benefits

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

Support

• Relocation Support
• Language learning support
• Translation/interpretation support
  *See this page for details

Additional details

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