From Google to Mujin: One Engineer's New Start in Japan

Heman’s family moved around a lot when he was young. He was born in India and went to university in the USA, but he spent time in Japan and the UK for a few years in between.

Heman began his career as a software engineer at Google in the USA.  But in 2023 he decided to leave it all behind and move back to Japan.  He found a job working on robot SDKs at Mujin and made his way to Tokyo.

We sat down with him to learn more about his journey — here’s the story.

By the way, you can also listen to the interview on Spotify!

Profile: Heman is a software engineer at Mujin, where he focuses on making robotics systems more accessible and impactful in industrial settings. After a career at Google in the U.S., he moved to Japan to explore new challenges, drawn by the opportunity to work on practical, real-world problems in robotics at Mujin.

Moving Back to Japan from the USA

First off, what made Heman decide to leave his life in the USA and move back to Japan?

He says his biggest reason for coming back to Japan was that he wanted to revisit the country he had lived in as a child. He remembered that he enjoyed life in Japan as a kid, and wanted to explore the country more. 

Of course, moving back to Japan to work would be a very different experience.  Heman decided he wanted to gain the perspective of working in Japan as a fully-fledged adult.

Once his mind was made up to move to Japan, Heman’s first thought was to apply for an internal transfer to Google’s Tokyo office.  However, there was a timing issue. 

Due to the circumstances at the time, Heman couldn’t get much traction on his idea of transferring within Google.  The company was also going through layoffs around that time and he was beginning to wonder if “the dream job was starting to end a little bit”.

So Heman decided that he’d take a chance and try something completely new.  Heman searched for positions in Tokyo from overseas.  And a little over a year later he joined Mujin and picked up and moved to Tokyo.

Getting Settled in at Mujin 

Back at Google, Heman was working on some challenging problems related to machine learning for Google Shopping Graph, a service to enhance users' shopping experience online .  But at the same time, whenever he told people what he was working on, “90% of the response was like, what?”.  Average people didn’t have the context needed to really understand his work.  Heman found that Google is “this very distant tech island. A lot of the things I could do at Google just sort of don't exist outside”. 

So making the switch from Google to Mujin was quite interesting.

Heman had also been interviewing for a few other tech companies in Japan, but he realized many of them were building web services on top of Google Cloud.  Unfortunately, Heman found Google Cloud to essentially be “a slightly nerfed version” of what he was already doing at Google. So from his perspective, “that was definitely a little uninteresting”.

But Heman found Mujin’s work with robotics intriguing, and decided it was the best match for his goals.  Transitioning to Mujin was especially exciting because Heman sees Mujin as a “company that’s more grounded in reality”, from the products to even how things are managed.

Heman shared that “it just felt like a more interesting kind of problem to work on because it's like, you're dealing with the real world.”

Building Software for Robots

Heman works on the Product Team for Mujin’s robot controllers, which help industrial robots visualize the situation and assess the tasks that need to be done with perception, awareness and autonomous decision-making. The goal of his team is to make their platform “more like a product”.  In other words, making it easy for as many companies as possible to integrate their platform simply.

Mujin’s controllers are compatible with almost all robots in the market and can be connected to any system in the factory or warehouse. 

They have a huge competitive edge being based in Japan, since almost 50% of all robot hardware in the world is created here. Japan has always been strong when it comes to hardware, but most would agree they’ve lagged behind somewhat in software.  Mujin is helping bridge this gap by building a talented team of international software engineers directly in Tokyo. 

Heman says that being able to work on this robot platform is exciting to see from a higher level. Day to day, he works on projects to help integrate this software platform into existing factories as easily as possible. 

The current method of setting up the platform includes sending over an integrator with the software to help their clients. Then Heman says there was a “realization that the first users of this product are actually the Mujin developers and integrators themselves. They already have pain points and things that can improve about the product”, Heman said. “So we quietly sort of became a DevOps team to help with that”. 

The ultimate goal for the Product Team is to make the world’s first scalable robotics product, a plug-and-play platform with all the capabilities built in so that clients can start using it more easily and efficiently. This way, Mujin can send the box to a factory and say, “you plug it in, and then you click a few buttons and it works”. 

Compared to Google, where Heman felt like he was designing “abstractions” for web apps, the work at Mujin feels more like “dealing with the real world”. He says they run into questions like whether they should fix problems by changing what the robot does, or “what if we just stuck a little bit of tape on the warehouse chute?”.

Heman says that there’s such “a different approach to problem-solving that I really, really enjoy”. The chance to think about physical spaces is unique for a software engineer.

"MujinController isn’t just a typical web app," Heman explains. "I like to think of it as an operating system for robots—kind of like how Android runs on top of Linux." Heman primarily codes the application layer in Python for efficiency, while using C++ for lower-level tasks that require closer interaction with hardware.

Dispelling Concerns about Working in Japan

Like many people interested in working in Japan, Heman notes that he was aware of the image of “black companies” in Japan.

He says he didn’t really have a “radar” for what a company with a good work environment would look like when he was searching for a job, which was pretty scary at first.

What helped was meeting his manager during the hiring process. Being exposed to his future colleagues and seeing the actual people he was going to work with gave him more confidence in his decision to join. Heman says he realized, “Wait, this guy is about as chill as my Google manager. This is probably fine… If I’m working with this person, then it’s not going to be those horror stories of long hours and overwork”. 

At Japan Dev, we’ve found this to be a common theme among engineers who move to Japan.  A lot of people who want to work here get discouraged by third-person stories and negative comments they see online.  Actually talking to your potential team members can really help humanize a company and show you what it’s really like to work with their team.

After all, teams are made up of people, so every team is different.

Adjusting to Life at Mujin

Overall, Heman found Mujin to be a great fit.  But there were still a few things he had to get used to. Of course there are differences between a FAANG company like Google and a smaller company like Mujin.  And some of those became clear when we asked about the work culture compared to Google.

For one thing, Mujin engineers are generally free to simply install necessary apps and services on their laptops. Mujin has a team that does 3D vision detection and once in a while, someone would say, “Why is my Python code completely broken? It’s like, yeah, because you locally installed a different NumPy version. The fact that you can even do that here is different”. 

At Google, Heman says, “You don’t have a local copy to develop off of. That’s not how it works. You're like, if I install this, some IT guy is going to come and email me and say, don't do that”.

However, Heman found the systems of communication at Google to be more straightforward as a tradeoff for this freedom. As a bigger company, they have more experience in systemizing things and having guardrails in place. 

The knowledge gap between different teams might be bigger at Mujin, because the systems are developing and changing at a different pace. This requires people to move faster and it gets a bit tricky to communicate, but Heman says “people are still really happy to explain things, so it’s not bad, just really different”. 

“Also, no standing desks, this was a big one”, Heman said with a laugh. “People were also trying to show off about the coffee machine, which was also a bit of a disappointment”. Mujin imports hand-picked coffee beans from Brazil, but when it comes to these types of benefits, it can be hard to compete with Google. “However, the lunch provided at Mujin is awesome.”

Overall, Heman prefers being able to see how much impact he can have at Mujin. He notes that, “I’m only one year old here, but if anybody wants to touch any API and they get confused about something, there’s a decent probability that I get pinged by them, even from the senior developers from other teams”. “Every team has great responsibility here and I would have never been able to work like this at big tech like Google”

Mujin’s Work Culture

The cultural difference is another aspect of working at Mujin that took some time to adjust to. 

At Mujin, the whole engineering team operates fully in English, and the majority of the developers are from outside of Japan.  And not that he needs it at work, but Heman also speaks pretty good Japanese.  As a result, he says the transition went pretty smoothly.

But coming from a very American company, Heman did have to adjust to some nuances of Japanese communication style. Japan’s high-context, indirect communication style took a little bit of getting used to.

And though the team is mostly international engineers, with some non-native English speakers, Heman did run into some points of confusion at times.  He says it was a learning process to figure out what someone intended to say. Everyone communicates differently, and sometimes the communication style is less of a language barrier and more cultural.

One person might communicate in a more polite “Japanese” way, whereas someone else might be more “Western” and direct. And sometimes a given message will change a bit because they’re translating it from Japanese to English.

Heman notes that “the nice thing is that everybody’s trying to be good about it, so it’s not negative”. It takes some adjusting so that everyone meets in the middle. 

Outside of work, Mujin’s People Operations Department helps international hires set up their bank accounts, cellphones, and provide temporary housing within walking distance of the office. So with most of the daily essentials taken care of, Heman has recently started exploring Tokyo and the neighboring prefectures and trying to build up a social activity. 

Cultural Differences in Hiring and Job Interviews

As a job board, we were curious about what companies in Japan can do to attract top candidates like Heman?

In response to this question, his biggest point was to just “be fast about your hiring process.” Basically, he recommends getting back to people quickly and keeping them updated about their status. Especially getting interviews scheduled with an international candidate (who’s in a different time zone), “The timing is terrible and hard to coordinate”. 

Another thing was managing expectations for the candidate’s experience level. 

During the interview process with a few other companies, Heman said, “Towards the start, it sounded like I was a good fit. Then over time maybe the recruiter found more candidates so that impression started changing. That felt a bit misleading, and I wonder if there was an objective standard to begin with, or did they just find five people with more experience?”. 

Heman notes that this might be an inevitable situation, but it would help to control how the hiring managers communicate their expectations with the candidates. 

Heman also noticed that Japanese companies “want to tell you what their business is about more than American companies do. At some point I remember going through an interview thinking, ‘Thanks for telling me what your annual performance is, but what’s your tech stack?’”. 

This difference might be partially explained by membership-based vs. job-based work cultures. When hiring an employee in the USA, it’s common to have a specific job that the company needs someone to do, such as “backend engineer”. If the employee can’t perform that role, then that’s considered unacceptable and the company would essentially likely fire them.

In Japan, companies have historically seen their employees as members of the company first. They train employees to do whatever they need them to, based on the company’s goals.  So in this case, it benefits the company if the employee has a better understanding of the company’s customer base, market share, and profitability. 

Hiring practices in Japan are evolving, and may be shifting away somewhat from this mindset.  But still, Heman’s experience suggests there are still some cultural differences remaining. 

He says that as an American applying for an engineer position, “it was confusing sitting through all these recruiters telling you who their customers are, how much they’ve sold,” 

But Heman says he grew to appreciate this information: “I kind of liked it once I realized what was happening though, I just wish someone told me at the start that the recruiter was going to talk to me about market share”.

It sounds like some companies in Japan could benefit from a more transparent interview process.

Tips for Engineers Who Want to Work in Japan

Heman’s advice for people who also want to work in Japan is to reflect on your why. Is it because of the work itself, or is it just because of Japan? He says that it’s important to “make sure the type of work and the flexibility is something that won’t make you less happy”.

Moving to a different country can be fun, but it also comes with challenges. Heman emphasized that learning Japanese and Japanese culture will make it much easier and more fulfilling to be able to communicate with everyone. 

Heman would highly recommend applying to Mujin if you like having freedom and flexibility on your tasks and having control over how you do things, especially on the Product Team. He says there’s so much “opportunity to learn, but then also be allowed to introduce new things to the team”. This speaks to the level of collaboration and communication that goes on internally. 

Are you interested in working on intelligent robotics?  Mujin offers a rare chance to work in English from Tokyo and impact the industry on a global scale. Check out Mujin's open job positions here! 

P.S. Want to listen to the audio version of this interview? Check it out on Spotify below