Engineering Manager (Platform Engineering) - Mercari

Position Overview

Team

Platform group is responsible for helping engineers at Mercari and its subsidiaries to build and deliver better products to our customers. We provide infrastructure and developer experience and make the service more reliable and engineer’s work easier.

Currently, the Platform group consists of 4 teams: Platform DX, CI/CD, Network and Platform infra. Platform DX is working on improving the developer experience. CI/CD is providing testing infrastructure, toolings, and the delivery system. Network is responsible for edge, Cloud, and data center networking. Platform infra is working on base Cloud management and observability tooling. By working with multiple layers of teams, we achieve the mission of the Platform group.

Recent or in-progress projects

The following is some of the recent or in-progress projects which Platform group is working on:

• Provide a temporary role granting system for Kubernetes RBAC and Google Cloud Platform IAM. This allows developers and SRE not to have modification roles by default and get it only when required. With it, we move forward to Zero touch production and make the platform more secure (Platform DX).
• Provide Kubernetes abstraction framework. Currently, developers need to handle the wall of YAML to deploy services. With this framework, we abstract many fundamental configurations away from developers' hands and reduce the cost of deploying new services (Platform DX).
• Introduce Istio service mesh and working on from stabilization to supporting gradual adoption to 100+ microservices (See more details on talk at IstioCon) (Network).
• Provide canary delivery pipelines on Spinnaker by leveraging the Istio feature provided by the Network team. The pipeline can be defined by the code and make it easy to generate and change by pull request (CI/CD)
• Provide secure CI systems for automated infrastructure continuous delivery. We have terraform monorepo which manages different team’s service infrastructure. Before CI was executed by a single strong account, which has huge risk if leaked, but now it’s executed with delegated least privileged account for each team (Platform infra).
• Migrate from zonal and routes-based Kubernetes cluster to regional and VPC-native Kuberntes cluster without any downtime and with less impacts on the product development. This cluster is our main multi-tenant cluster which runs 100+ microservices and receives 80,000+ req/sec (See more details on our engineering blog)

Role

We are looking for an engineering manager of one of the teams in the Platform group, who has a strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development. Someone who can commit to increasing the team’s outcomes by envisioning the long-term goal and roadmap which is aligned with organizational goals, supporting the career growth of the members and scaling of the team by hiring, and improving the process. 

What you will do

• Envision long-term goal and roadmap of platform improvements and execute
• Propose the strategies to solve the organizational wide infrastructure problems 
• Manage process to help the team do its best job
• Handle goal setting and evaluations for engineer growth each quarter
• Hold 1on1 with direct reports for regular communication and feedback
• Assign projects and roles to engineers by considering future career growth
• Recruit great engineers

Bold Challenges

Since the platform and its toolings are used by not only Mercari JP but also Merpay and Mercari US, the changes and improvements can affect the whole organization performance from development agility to system reliability. As an engineering manager of the team, you can lead and support the team to have such a large impact. As the base infrastructure team, the team has lots of stakeholders. While listening to the requests from them and taking care of the system's reliability and maintainability, you need to make lots of decisions that can impact long-term but are very challenging.

Required Experience

• Shared belief in Mercari’s mission and values
• Experience of infrastructure management and automation
• Experience of platform development and operation
• Experience of system architecture design
• Experience of management 
• Experience working on projects across teams

Preferred Experience

• Experience of distributed system or microservices architecture
• Experience making technical decisions as a tech lead
• Experience hiring engineers (screening applications, interviewing, direct recruiting, hosting events, etc.)

Screening Criteria

• Strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development
• Desire to learn new technologies
• Capability of understanding project priorities and assigning engineers appropriately
• Capability of understanding individual engineer’s motivations and encouraging both their personal growth and that of the business
• Strong communication skill to solve organizational problems

Language Requirements

• English: Proficient (CEFR - C1)
• Japanese: Independent (CEFR - B2)  preferred

Related Articles

• Istio is a long wild river: how to navigate it safely
• Mercari's Shintaro Yamada discusses what makes a truly strong “organization and person“
• Mercari CEO Yamada, CTO Namura, and Merpay CTO Sogawa look back at past decisions and their background [Part 1] 
• Mercari CEO Yamada, CTO Namura, and Merpay CTO Sogawa envision a future of challenges [Part 2]

Working Conditions

Employment Status

Full-time

• Probationary period: First 3 months after joining the company. (During this period your contract conditions will be the same as that of a permanent employee.)

Office Roppongi

• Smoking is prohibited within our offices
• Mercari has introduced a work style policy called “Your Choice.” Each member is free to choose whether they want to work in the office or work fully remote. ​*Exceptions made for certain kinds of work.

Work Hours

• Scheduled working hours: 10 AM – 7 PM

Holidays

• Two days off per week (as well as national holidays, New Year's break, etc.)
• Paid leave, congratulatory and bereavement leave, relax days, sick leave

Salary

• Annual salary paid in 12 monthly installments (including fixed overtime allowance)
• Based on skills, experience, and abilities
• Reviewed twice a year

Benefits

• Complete health and social insurance
• Incentive program
• Support systems, including those that benefit employee family members
• Language learning support
• Translation/interpretation support

*See this page for details.

Support

• Relocation Support

 *See this page for details