Software Engineer, Backend Architecture

Team’s Mission / Work Responsibilities

Team mission:

• Unleash BE teams’ potential: to support backend teams in building product features by providing robust architectural guidance and tackling complex problems and performance issues. We strive to be BE teams’ reliable partners, enabling them to focus on delivering high-quality software and enhancing the overall user experience.
• Drive re architecture and FinOps: We are committed to developing short and mid-term plans for rearchitecting our systems, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and cost optimization. By adopting efficient FinOps practices, we aim to optimize resource allocation and maximize cost-effectiveness, enabling the organization to achieve its business objectives effectively.
• Build a platform as a service: Our long-term mission is to establish a scalable and future-proof platform as a service (PaaS) working side-by-side with platform and SRE teams. By creating a robust foundation and leveraging modern technologies, we aim to provide a comprehensive and extensible platform that empowers the development teams to rapidly build, deploy, and scale their applications, driving innovation and efficiency across the organization.

Background

• As Mercari's user base continues to grow rapidly, reaching approximately 21 million active users, and as our platform expands to include new lines of businesses, it is imperative that our backend architecture remains highly resilient and adaptable in order to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Providing a robust and extensible support system for our users and new business ventures is paramount to our continued success.
• The Backend Architects team serves as the driving force behind Mercari's marketplace architecture, playing a crucial role in providing cutting-edge design and architecture solutions to support the company's ongoing expansion. Their responsibility lies in empowering and enabling all of Mercari's backend teams with the latest and most advanced architecture designs to support our rapid growth.
• As a backend architect in the team, you will support different high priority and high impact projects across different areas in the marketplace, providing the proper guidance, tackling complex problems and performance issues, and make sure that BE teams’ are on the right track.
• You will be part of the short-term, mid-term, and long-term plans for FinOps activities and cost optimization, and provide the comprehensive and extensible framework that empowers the development teams.

Specific work responsibilities include the following:

• Design the overall architecture and roadmap for Mercari’s backend systems
• Design and implement common middlewares and core microservices
• Work with the Platform and SRE team to provide a robust microservices platform
• Work across multiple backend teams to help design, build and evolve microservices
• Help form a healthy organization structure, define guidelines on service development, testing, deploy and monitoring to the whole engineering organization
• Help building and pushing forward the plans for FinOps initiatives, and the overall BE framework.

Unique and Bold Challenges

• You will be able to play an active role in our architecture team across the whole of Mercari in various business impacting areas, and partake in our journey of unleashing Mercari’s backend engineers’ full potential.
• The backend architecture team at Mercari enables you to tackle the potential challenges of our products in order to create both a collaborative and comprehensive environment for our service. You will gain deep insight into further empowering our products, and have the opportunity to work on large scale platforms that act as an essential support to the entire organization.
• You will work in a super diverse team, along with members coming from different countries to support teams who use both Japanese and English.

Required Qualifications

• Shared understanding and belief in Mercari Group mission and values
• Strong programming skills
• Experience building scalable and robust API
• Experience with SOA or microservices architecture design
• Good documentation and communication skill

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiar with Golang
• Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Good understanding of cloud-native applications and infrastructure, especially GCP
• Demonstrated skills in leading projects across multiple teams