Software Engineer, Backend

About SmartNews

News should be for everyone. But not when it’s buried under cat videos—or when your internet is spotty—or when it’s in a filter bubble. That’s why we created SmartNews.

Our mission is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. To accomplish this:

We are a machine learning company. News should be impartial, trending and trustworthy. Our algorithms evaluate millions of articles, social signals and human interactions to deliver the top 0.01% of stories that matter most, right now.

We love content. News should be sustainable. We support quality journalism and respect publishers by sharing article traffic and revenue.

Please note that we will only consider you for one application at a time.

Position

Mission

SmartNews is a technology company driven by our mission of delivering the world's quality information to those who need it. Our leading mobile news app has tens of millions of monthly active users in Japan and the US. Our goal is to grow SmartNews into a top global product, delivering quality information that supports millions worldwide.

One step toward achieving that goal is developing a highly-scalable, world-class backend platform.

Culture

Our engineers come from a variety of backgrounds from large, well-established companies to small ventures. We believe that employees with diverse skills sets working together make for strong, cohesive teams.

Visit our People page to see interviews of our engineering leaders!

Responsibilities

• Plan and execute engineering development of robust and scalable backend systems to enable state-of-the-art news delivery to millions of users
• Support the maintenance and the stability of our world-class core news delivery system components
• Collaborate closely with global cross-functional teams (Product Managers, Editors, Machine Learning engineers) to develop backend systems for new news-related product features
• Work closely with software engineers to optimize backend systems for news articles, pages, channels, search, and other news-related features to provide a high-quality user experience and increase user engagement
• Work closely with News Ranking and AI Foundation teams to develop systems that deliver personalized news
• Proactive, innovative, and creative problem solving for system improvements which will result in user impact

  Teams and Their Responsibilities

  Ads
  Build high-quality, relevant, and profitable advertisement platforms

  Content Platform
  Work on scalability, flexibility, and new features for the entire content processing pipeline

  Engagement
  Develop scalable backend services to improve users' engagement

  Growth
  Build and improve efficient marketing platform for JP Business Development and Marketing teams to support user acquisition

  Infrastructure
  Build and operate highly scalable infrastructure services

  News Ranking & Delivery
  Build news ranking and delivery systems that improves user experience through personalization

Your qualification

• 3+ years of experience in building distributed, highly-scalable systems supporting millions of users, including design, coding, and evaluation/testing (Prefer Java, Kotlin, Scala. Open to Python, Golang)
• Strong educational background in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical fields
• Passion and interest towards solving world problems such as the digital divide, filter bubbles, echo chambers, group polarization, etc.
• Business-level or higher English abilities

Will be a plus

• Experience developing ranking/recommendation/search related systems
• Failure analysis and performance tuning in JVM operation
• Familiar with tech stacks such as AWS, Spring-Boot, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Flink, etc.

What we offer

• Support program for employee’s self-development and well-being
• Healthy lunches are prepared on-site daily in our SmartKitchen, located in our West Office building. You can even see the cooks at work!
• Need a pick-me-up? Stop by ChikyuCoffee, our in-house coffee shop located in both the East and West Office buildings, and get a cup of gourmet coffee, espresso-based beverage, or other seasonal drink!
• SmartNews provides all healthcare and social insurance benefits required by Japanese labor law