NEWSLETTER

Autify

Tokyo

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Senior Technical Support Engineer

Tokyo
Remote OK - Worldwide
Full-time
December 15, 2023

The Technical Support Engineering (TSE) team is part of the Engineering department and was created to investigate and solve technical issues from customers that cannot be resolved by the first-tier Customer Support team.

Investigation is the primary focus, but TSE is also expected to help improve the capability of the Customer Support team to answer simple inquiries by themselves. This help can come in the form of documenting known issues, writing customer-facing documentation or providing training. Additionally, the team can propose logging and debugging improvements to both broaden and deepen the team’s investigation capability, carry out minor coding projects to implement said improvements, contribute to product documentation, and last but not least, make product improvement suggestions based on reported customer issues.

Since the root cause of a customer issue could occur anywhere within the Autify system, TSEs are required to develop a very broad understanding of Autify’s product architecture and infrastructure so that they can make a reasonable assumption about where to start investigating before digging deeper as and when needed.

Our primary stakeholders are the Customer Support and Customer Success teams, and we hold a variety of regular sync meetings with those teams to share information about potential issues, known issues, and any current investigations that are in progress and potentially of interest.

As with the wider Engineering department, TSE uses the Scrum project management framework for its daily work. The associated Scrum ceremonies (daily stand-ups, refinements, retrospective & planning), as well as a weekly team meeting, are all held in English. Additionally, ad-hoc meetings may be held, such as for pair investigation work, and these can be done in English or Japanese depending on the preference and ability of the attending members.

Note: This role is aimed at supporting customers in the Japanese market, so you must be able to work in Japan standard time. Working hours are flexible but you must be available during the core collaboration hours of 10 am to 2 pm JST.

Responsibilities

Respond to technical inquiries from the Customer Support and Customer Success teams
Work with your TSE colleagues and other Engineering teams to investigate issues, devise potential workarounds, and try to determine the root cause of those issues
Verify and escalate product bugs to the appropriate Development team
Propose new features and stability improvements based on the results of your investigations
Contribute to both internal and customer-facing documentation
Ensure efficient communication and collaboration between all the stakeholders across the escalation chain

Required Skills & Experience

3+ years of experience supporting and troubleshooting SaaS applications (experience as a developer handling technical support equivalent duties will also be considered)
Basic JavaScript or TypeScript knowledge
Excellent communication skills
Business-level English language skills

Desirable Skills & Experience

A computer science or engineering background, preferably in web application or mobile app development
Experience with Ruby on Rails
Experience with test automation or software quality assurance - in particular, test automation frameworks such as Selenium or Appium
Customer-facing support experience
Fluent English
Japanese language skills at a level that allows for daily conversation and reading of documents

Desired Personality Traits

Strong discipline in analyzing and documenting issues
Passionate about digging deep into problems and going beyond a shallow understanding
Skilled at isolating and determining root causes from execution logs and error information
Able to prioritize and work to deadlines, even when the workload is high

¥7,000,000 - ¥10,000,000 a year

Reviewed twice a year

Selection Process

1. Submission of a take-home coding test

2. Technical interview: 60 mins

3. HR interview: 45 mins

4. Hiring Manager interview: 60 mins

*Please note that we will ask you to provide references after the final interview.

About the Engineering Team

Our Team

Autify's engineering team is international, with more than half of the engineers being foreign nationals and all developers being English speakers. We have a good culture where members respect each other's backgrounds. Since we have two products, Autify for Web and Autify for Mobile, our development engineers are divided into two teams corresponding to each product. We have about 30 front-end, back-end, and technical support engineers who work closely with engineering managers, product managers, QA managers, designers, and machine learning engineers. The product manager is in charge of the general roadmap. The product manager develops a rough roadmap and works with the engineers and designers on the details of each feature and bug fixes before implementation. Depending on the size of the feature, we appoint a feature lead from among the engineers to be in charge of the project and give them the discretion to make technical decisions.

Our Development Process

We create a ticket about what kind of function we will develop. In some cases, the product owner creates it based on user feedback; in other cases, each team creates bugs and investigation requests directly.

The development cycle consists of one Sprint, which takes two weeks. Development tasks are assigned during the planning stage on the first day of the Sprint, and we hold a daily standup meeting to check the overall progress and any problems. (If there is a time difference, it is done at lunchtime).

We review code on GitHub. After the review, the merged branches are automatically deployed to the staging environment, and E2E tests are performed (which Autify does itself).

After testing on the integrated branch, it's deployed to the production environment. Deployment is done several times a week as needed. We also hold sprint ceremonies like Sprint planning, feature refinement and sprint retrospective sessions. The developer will demonstrate the developed function to all employees at the end of the Sprint in the Sprint Demo.

Tech Stack

Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Go
Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Redux, Styled Components
Machine learning: Python, PyTorch, Kubernetes
Database: PostgreSQL, Redis
Test: Appium, Selenium, WebdriverIO, Puppeteer
Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform, Packer, MacStadium
Monitoring: Datadog, New Relic, Sentry
CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions
Source code management: GitHub
Project management: Jira
Misc.: G Suite, Slack, Notion, Gather, Zoom, Miro, 1Password, Mixmax, Calendly, etc.

Employment Conditions

Employment Status

Regular employees
Probation period: 3 months after joining the company (conditions are the same as permanent employment)

Work Location

Tokyo office or Remote (Hybrid)

Work Hours

Full flextime system

Note: The determination of working hours (start and end times) must be made to the extent that one's own duties (including guidance and supervision of subordinates) are properly performed and that there are no obstacles to work in terms of coordination and communication with other employees.

Bonus

Twice a year

Holidays/PTO

Complete a five-day workweek system (National holidays, year-end and New Year holidays, etc.)
Unlimited paid time off

Benefits

Equipped with various social insurance
Regular health checkups
Stock option
A laptop PC will be rented when joining the company
Remote work allowance
English learning support
Skill-up support
Visa sponsorship
Relocation bonus
Relocation housing support

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About Autify

Autify, Inc. is a start-up company founded in San Francisco by a team of engineers who were the first Japanese team to graduate from the top US accelerator Alchemist Accelerator. With the mission to increase creativity with the power of tech, we develop and provide Autify, an AI-based software test automation platform.

Markets are changing rapidly, and there is a demand for quick software releases. Agile development has become mainstream; on a global scale, 92% of developer teams adopt agile development, 71% of which aim to release at least once a week. With such a rapid cycle, manual verification is too time-consuming, and there is an urgent need for automation. Our services can solve these critical challenges and make our clients a competitive advantage in software development.

Over 300 companies have begun using their service since its official release in October 2019, and that number is continuing to grow.

QA’s global budget is said to reach over $1 trillion. We are rapidly expanding our service reach internationally to win this vast global market.

Japanese Language Policy
Autify doesn’t require Japanese skills for engineers. All oral and written communications (including slack and all documentation) is in English, so there’s no need for engineers to speak Japanese.
Visa Sponsorship
Autify’s flexible when it comes to helping you get a visa. They’re willing to hire people currently living overseas and sponsor your visa (as long as you fulfill the Japanese visa eligibility requirements). Autify also allows working from abroad while waiting for your visa to be approved.

They’re even open to having people continue to work remotely from outside of Japan longer-term as long as you can be available during normal business hours in the JST time zone.
Paid Leave
10 days of paid leave and 5 days of sick leave plus public holidays in Japan.
Benefits
💹 Employee stock option plan

💻 New tech gear (Laptop PC will be lent when joining the company)

👩‍🎓 Skill development support

🏠 Remote work allowance

💛 Support for attending conferences

🧡 Seminar participation support

📕 Book purchases

👶 Parental Leave

👩‍🏫 English learning/skill improvement program support

💜 Social security / insurance benefits included

🏥 Healthcare insurance

💚 Pension insurance
Remote Work
Autify is working 100% remotely currently, so they don’t require members to live in Tokyo, if you are able to relocate to Japan. They also have quarterly in-person meetings in Tokyo but it’s not mandatory to commute to Tokyo once every three months. You can also join remotely.

Note: We welcome remote work from other countries as long as you can work during the JST time zone. Those living outside of Japan will remotely join quarterly in-person meetings.
Work style
Work hours: Full flex time (No Core Time!)

Autify allows their members to choose their own hours as long as they average 8 hours a day each month. There may be times when you’re expected to join meetings and you may need to be online during the JST time zone, but otherwise work hours are flexible.