Software Engineer (Platform Engineering) - Mercari

Tokyo
Remote OK - Anywhere in Japan
Full-time
March 25, 2024

Position Overview

Team

The 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 DevOps toolchains to increase the reliability of the service and make the work of engineers easier.

Currently, the Platform Group consists of four teams:

Platform DX: Working on improving the developers experience by providing better abstraction and automated workflows
CI/CD: Providing testing infrastructure, toolings, and the delivery system to make service delivery faster and more reliable
Network: Responsible for end-to-end network infrastructure from the edge (CDN) to the cloud & service mesh (Istio) and physical data centers
Platform Infra: Working on the base infrastructure operations as the cloud (GCP & AWS) and Kubernetes admin, as well as building the observability platform
You can see more details about the team structure on our tech blog How we reorganize the platform team.

Recent or in-progress projects

The following are some of the recent or in-progress projects which the Platform Group has been working on:

Provide a temporary role-granting system for Kubernetes RBAC and Google Cloud Platform IAM (Platform DX)
- This allows developers and SRE not to have modification roles by default and get it only when required. With the system, we move forward to zero-touch production and make the platform more secure.
Provide a Kubernetes abstraction framework (Platform DX)
- 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.
Introduce Istio service mesh and work on stabilization to supporting gradual adoption to 100+ microservices (Network)
- See more details about this in our talk at IstioCon
Build tool to spin up pull request-based testing environments and flexible routing systems with Istio (CI/CD)
- With this, developers can easily set up the QA environment with multiple nested microservices
Provide secure CI systems for automated infrastructure continuous delivery (Platform Infra)
- We have Terraform monorepo which manages different teams’ service infrastructure. Before CI was executed by a single strong account, which has a huge risk if leaked, now it’s executed with a delegated least-privileged account for each team.
Migrate from zonal and routes-based Kubernetes cluster to regional and VPC-native Kubernetes cluster without any downtime and with fewer impacts on the product development (all teams)
- 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 a software engineer for one of the teams in the Platform Group who has a strong background (or interest) in platform or infrastructure system development. Someone who is passionate about increasing developer productivity and has a pragmatic ability to release and migrate features to large-scale systems gradually.

What you will do

Design, develop, and maintain platform features and toolings which support the entire software development cycle from build to test through to deploy and operate
Support migration and adoptions of new platform features and toolings
Improve platform security and reliability with the SRE and Security teams
Improve and automate daily platform operations and reduce toils
Communicate with internal developers to understand their needs

You may be a fit if you

Are passionate about improving developer productivity and experience
Are passionate about infrastructure automation and building toolings
Are neutral on the technology itself and can take pragmatic approaches to the issues
Enjoy advocating for the new tooling and systems, and supporting to use it
Avoid reinventing the wheel and utilize the existing tooling and ecosystem as much as possible

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’s performance from development agility to system reliability. As a software engineer of the team, your implementation can have a truly significant impact.

The team needs to understand what the developers are struggling with and what is required for the Mercari Group’s product development. With this empathy and collection of requirements, the team prioritizes the problems to solve and decides the solution for them. You can join this decision-making process and propose a pragmatic solution leveraging your knowledge and experience.

Required Experience

Common

Shared understanding and belief in our company’s mission and values
Experience in infrastructure management and automation
Experience in infrastructure and system architecture design
Experience in writing design docs or proposals and reaching agreements with stakeholders
Experience in using container management platforms (ex: Kubernetes) in production
Experience in operating and being the admin of cloud (GCP or AWS) in production
Good understanding of common software development lifecycle (SDLC)

Platform DX team-specific requirements

2 years of experience using Go
Experience in writing CLI tools and packages in Go

Network team-specific requirements

Experience working with network proxies such as Envoy/HAProxy/Nginx
Strong understanding of networking, especially OSI Layer 4 to 7: load balancers, proxies, API gateways, DNS, TLS, and HTTP protocol
Good understanding of Linux networking
Working knowledge of cloud and Kubernetes networking
Preferred Experience

Common

Experience in a distributed system or microservices architecture
Experience developing and supporting tools for internal customers
Experience making technical decisions as a tech lead
Experience of working as an SRE
Experience writing Go (and scripting with bash)

Platform DX team-specific preferred experience

Experience in frontend development with React
Experience in interface and UI/UX design

Network team-specific preferred experience

Experience in using service meshes in production such as Istio or Linkerd
Experience in using network reliability practices such as circuit breaking, rate limiting
Experience in designing cloud-based network architectures

Language Requirements

English: Proficient (CEFR - C1)
Japanese: Basic (CEFR - A2) optional

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About Mercari

Largest C2C marketplace in Japan and Japan's first tech unicorn, Mercari is aiming to become a truly global tech company. Their app allows anyone with a smartphone to easily sell items they no longer need, providing a new and unique user experience.

Circulate all forms of value

To unleash the potential in all people

“What can I do to help society thrive with the finite resources we have?”

The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them.

Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential.

Japanese Language Policy
Mercari doesn't require Japanese skill for developers to do their day to day jobs. It's becoming a pretty international company, but they have many Japanese engineers, so the more Japanese you know the better.
Visa Sponsorship
Mercari sponsors Japanese visas for engineers. The only condition is that you meet the requirements of the Japanese government (but this is the case at every company). This usually means that you'll need a bachelor's degree or 10 years of demonstrated work experience in your field.
Paid Leave
- Two days off per week (Saturday and Sunday), Japanese national holidays, New Year's vacation
- Paid Leave (starting with 10 days, adding 1 day each year)
- Sick leave (10 days per year)
- Relax days (3 extra vacation days that can be taken year-round)
- Bereavement Leave
- Maternity/paternity and caregiving support
- Caregiving leave
- Paid childbirth leave and gift
- Paid honeymoon leave and gift
- Condolence money and paid leave
Benefits
🏥 Health insurance

💹 Employee stock option plan

🚃 Full transportation coverage

💻 The latest equipment - computer, monitor, smartphone

🍹 Free drinks

💴 Seminar participation support

📓 Book purchases

👩‍🎓 Language learning support

🌎 Translation/interpretation support

🍔 Chat lunch

💛 Financial support for fertility treatment

💜 Financial support for childcare costs

💚 Financial support for private preschools
Remote Work
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.

※ You will be required to come to Japan if you are living abroad.
Work style
(Dev Team Members)
- Fixed working hours 10:00-19:00.
- Flex time (core hours 12:00-16:00, 60 minute lunch)
Tech Stack
* Backend Languages: Go & PHP * Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, React.js, Next.js, Redux, etc) * Mobile Languages: Kotlin, Swift, Java, Objective-C * Infrastructure: Dedicated servers, MySQL, memcached, Nginx, Solr, Elastic Search, Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Spanner, Cloud SQL, Datastore, Storage, Stackdriver Logging, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, etc.) * Configuration management tool: Terraform * CI/CD: Circle CI / Spinnaker * Monitoring: Stackdriver Monitoring / Datadog / PagerDuty / Sentry / Mackerel / NewRelic / ELK Stack * Knowledge Tools: Confluence / Crowi * Other: GitHub / Slack / JIRA * Process: Scrum
Diversity
There is more diversity in the world than any of us can imagine. Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is strongly linked to Mercari’s mission as we aim to build a company environment where everyone can be themselves and work to their fullest potential.

Diverse Backgrounds

We already have members with many diverse backgrounds at Mercari. Our goal is for everyone to have equal chances to do their best work, without dividing individuals into groups based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, physical ability, or any other identifying feature, and without classifying anyone as “majority” or “minority.” We strive to create various policies and initiatives to make this a reality.

No Quotas

Mercari does not set quotas, such as a 50:50 gender balance or a specific number of countries represented, because we feel labeling groups and people in terms of numbers goes against our ideal of respecting the diversity inherent to all individuals. Meaningful efforts towards diversity are reflected not in the quantitative goals many companies tend to rely on, but in the thoughts and behavior of every person within.

Our Focus

Providing fair chances for members of all backgrounds Fostering a culture of learning to allow everyone to reach their full potential Creating an organization built on trust so that everyone working here feels like they truly belong Our first step is for D&I to take root in the thoughts and actions of all members at Mercari.