Engineering Team Lead, Management Track

About KATIX

KATIX is an online auction platform for high-value used goods, built around trust and transparency. Individuals sell. Only registered businesses bid. We started with motorcycles and cars, and we are planning to expand beyond vehicles.

The entire sale happens online. A seller photographs their vehicle and uploads the documents from their phone, the listing goes to auction, and the sale completes without a trip to a shop. That puts real weight on engineering: how easy the upload is, and how accurately the vehicle comes across to bidders, decide whether a deal closes.

The company was founded in 2006 (formerly Interfirm, renamed to match the platform) and is about 70 people today, average age around 27, more than 60 percent women. Around 20 new hires join in April 2027. The engineering team works in a mix of Japanese and English, and Japanese is the working language across the company.

Our direction is explicit: an AI-native engineering organization measured on business outcomes, not on features shipped. Engineering value is judged by what it changes in the business, and by how well it enables other departments to build with AI themselves.

The role

You are a tech lead who is ready to move toward management, or already partway there. You will lead a team of two to three other engineers, depending on the team, reporting to the Engineering Manager and working closely with the Principal Architect (who holds architecture sign-off) and the Product team.

The split is roughly 25 to 50 percent hands-on development and 50 to 75 percent leading people and coordinating work. The person in this role knows the tech stack and the business well enough to make good calls, and either has people-management skills already or is clearly ready to develop them.

We are hiring two people for this role. Each will take on a share of the team-facing work that currently sits with the Engineering Manager.

What you will own

People

• Regular 1on1s with each engineer on your team
• Setting and scoring goals for your team that tie to company KPIs, and contributing to evaluations
• Growth plans for each engineer, including developing your team's next tech lead
• Onboarding new hires and interns

Delivery

• The team's Kanban flow: planning, daily standups, retrospectives
• Removing blockers and keeping work moving from input to production
• Delivery metrics (lead time, review delay, deploy frequency) and acting on what they show

Business

• Translating company KPIs (listing rate, closing rate, lead time to listing, transaction volume) into your team's goals
• Reporting progress upward weekly, in terms of outcomes rather than tickets

Cross-department

• Working directly with Customer Success, Sales, Promotion, and Corporate, in Japanese, on requirements, expectations, and delivery
• Supporting other departments as they build with AI, so they can ship safely without a queue into engineering

AI-native practice

• Setting and holding the team's standards for AI-assisted development: how work is decomposed, how AI output is verified, how AI-generated code is reviewed
• Measuring the effect on the team's delivery and adjusting

Hiring

• Casual interviews, first interviews, and evaluating technical exercises for your team's open roles

Reliability

• Coordinating incidents that touch your team's systems, running blameless postmortems, and seeing follow-through to completion

Standards

• Contributing to engineering-wide standards: review culture, the team's Code of Conduct, AI usage guidelines

Hands-on

• Code review, architecture input, unblocking, and building features when the team needs it

The two things that matter most

1. You are serious about KATIX specifically. You have looked at the product, you understand what we are trying to do for people selling a vehicle, and you have a concrete reason to want to lead a team doing it here. We ask about this in every interview, and for this role we expect a clear answer.

2. You have changed how a team works with AI, not only how you work. Personal productivity with AI is table stakes. For this role we want evidence at the team or organization level: you introduced AI-assisted development to a team, set verification standards, built internal tooling or agents, and can describe what it did to the team's output. We look at this directly in the interviews.

What we are looking for

Required

• 5 or more years of professional web engineering, including at least one to two years as a tech lead or equivalent, leading a team of three or more engineers
• Full stack background in a modern web stack. You can review, unblock, and contribute in Next.js and TypeScript, and you are not put off by a Rails legacy on the bike side
• Japanese at JLPT N2 or higher. This is a hard requirement. You will lead team members who do not speak English, collaborate with non-engineering departments, and take part in meetings conducted in Japanese. It does not need to be perfect. It does need to work reliably above casual-conversation level.

Nice to have

• A track record of growing engineers: people you mentored who took on more, or a team whose output improved under you
• Led AI adoption at team level with outcomes you can describe
• Business fluency: you can explain how engineering work you led moved a business metric, and you are comfortable being measured that way
• Comfortable running 1on1s, giving direct and kind feedback, and facilitating a team's working rhythm
• Prior people-management responsibility, including hiring or evaluations
• Incident management and postmortem experience
• Kanban or flow-metrics experience
• Observability and SLO work (Sentry, New Relic)
• Marketplace, e-commerce, auction, or escrow-adjacent product experience
• Experience helping non-engineers build or automate with AI

Where this goes

Engineering Manager as the department grows, or the specialist track if you find the architecture and platform side is where you want to stay. Both paths are real and both are open to you. You choose your track.

Benefits

• Transparent compensation table, with performance reviews every six months
• Two performance bonuses per year
• Housing allowance if you live near Shibuya
• Dedicated budget for learning, certifications, and study
• Flextime with core hours from 10:00 to 16:00
• Hybrid work: one to two remote days per week depending on level, after the first six months
• Company-covered team lunches when three or more people go together
• Optional weekly study session; the team attends tech events and conferences together

Selection process

1. Casual interview with the Engineering Manager (about 30 minutes)
2. First interview with the Engineering Manager, covering your leadership experience and how you think about outcomes
3. Technical interview
4. Final interview with the CEO.

Typically two to four weeks from casual interview to decision.

Before applying, ask yourself

• Given the right resources, how confident am I that I can build anything I am asked to build?
• Can I describe a time I changed how a team works, and what it did to their output?
• Why do I want to lead a team at KATIX, and would that reason survive if I swapped in any other company's name?

If your answers are concrete and specific to KATIX, apply. If your reason is a general wish to move into management, that is understandable, but it is not what we are hiring for.

How to apply

You do not need a perfect resume. Tell us about a team you led, how it worked, and why KATIX. We would love to hear from you.