Staff / Principal Backend Engineer

About ZEALS

Are you looking

• To make meaningful changes at the fastest-growing tech company in Japan?
• For a fair, highly flexible, inclusive working environment where anyone, regardless of their background, can make an impact?
• To build the next bold idea in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology
• For a place where things are not just fast - but they happen now? 

We Are Zeals - “Designing conversations. Driving conversions.”

Zeals is not another chatbot. Our automated chat solution and conversational technology change how consumers purchase or act online. Zeals converts customers who appear "unengaged" to become "valuable" through designed chat on Messaging Apps. Using AI-powered, human-designed conversation flows across chat platforms, Zeals enables brands to build personalized, automated conversations with their consumers and develop a deeper understanding of their preferences while creating a delightful, seamless shopping experience. Our last 3 years have been phenomenal. We have captured the heart of many businesses in Japan, with over 480 enterprises relying on our chat commerce offering to boost their mobile business.

The goal is simple: to “revolutionize hospitality on the Internet” by unlocking digital customer service experiences that were limited to physical stores previously. 

Just Getting Started…

With more than 480 enterprise companies worldwide already utilizing our product, we are perfectly poised to seize market share and fuel exponential growth in the US market, with an eye on global expansion. Investors have taken note of our potential, leading us to recently secure nearly $40 million in funding, backed by Salesforce Ventures.

Position

As a Staff or Principal Backend Engineer at Zeals, you won’t just write code — you will own systems end-to-end, shape our architectural strategy, and influence technical direction across teams. You will be a key technical leader in our backend domain, responsible for designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems that power mission-critical services and accelerate the impact of our conversational commerce platform.

This role is not about following roadmaps — it's about creating them. You’ll work across teams to raise the engineering bar, mentor senior engineers, and drive strategic decisions that shape our product and infrastructure for years to come.

What You’ll Do

• Drive architecture and design of complex, distributed backend systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance
• Lead initiatives to modernize legacy systems and migrate to robust, decoupled services using Golang, gRPC, and REST
• Own high-stakes technical decisions, balancing trade-offs and setting standards for software design across teams
• Ensure best practices in clean code, DDD, testing, observability, and documentation are deeply embedded in the development lifecycle
• Collaborate with engineering leadership, product managers, and stakeholders to align backend capabilities with business priorities
• Foster a culture of technical excellence through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem solving
• When required, participate in the on-call rotation and act as a technical escalation point for critical incidents

Our Tech Stack

• Backend Languages: Go, Python, Elixir
• Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, React.js, Recoil, Zod, Tanstack, etc)
• Mobile Languages: None
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, GCP Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
• Configuration management tool: Terraform
• CI/CD: Github Actions, ArgoCD, CircleCI
• Monitoring: Grafana, GCP Cloud Monitoring, GCP Logging, GCP Cloud Trace, Opsgenie
• Data: BigQuery, Parquet, Spark, Scala, Python, dbt
• Knowledge Tools: Confluence
• Other: GitHub / Slack / Jira
• Process: Scrum

Your qualification

• 8+ years of experience in backend engineering with deep expertise in system design, architecture, and large-scale production systems
• Advanced knowledge of Golang (preferred), with professional experience in building and maintaining scalable APIs and services
• Strong track record in technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and driving cross-team architectural efforts
• Fluency in Clean Architecture, DDD, and modern software engineering principles
• Strong grasp of observability, performance profiling, and production debugging using metrics and tracing
• Confidence to challenge assumptions, push for clarity, and advocate for best practices

Will be a plus

• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure (preferably GCP)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., CircleCI) and engineering operations tooling (e.g., Jira)
• Experience working with polyglot environments (e.g., Python, Ruby, Node.js)
• Japanese language proficiency is a plus, but not required

What we offer

• Salary Range : competitive
• Performance review: twice a year
• Holidays: 10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave days per year.
• Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates.
• Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work from overseas
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office)
• Club activity allowance
• Team building allowance and Lunch allowance
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party)

Additional details

Don’t just take our word for it 

Zeals has received the LinkedIn Top Startups award twice in a row. We believe this is a testament to our growth and our ability to attract great talents–who could potentially be your colleague! 

Ready to roll up our sleeves

We're obsessed with bringing hospitality to everyone – whether it's our customers or you! You’re an individual with unique needs, and while we may not have ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars to offer, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers you’ll be proud to brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out! As an employer, we're ready to roll up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means making your experience better.