Bilingual Engineering Manager (Tokyo)

Position Overview

We are hiring a Bilingual Engineering Manager (EM) to scale our engineering organization for a rapidly growing SaaS product. This role maximizes outcomes by owning people leadership, team health, performance and growth, and by building scalable systems for hiring, resource allocation, and cross-team execution.

This role is not expected to be a day-to-day individual contributor writing production code. However, you must have strong technical judgment to evaluate risks, guide tradeoffs, and ensure sustainable delivery and quality.

You will operate as part of an engineering leadership group with the VPoE and peer EMs, with clear role allocation and shared accountability for organizational success.

 

Scope

• Org size managed: 20-30 engineers across teams (may include tech leads)
• Hiring target: 5-10 hires / quarter
• Spend responsibility: team/org-level tools + contractors/vendors within an agreed budget range
• Location: Japan (Tokyo/Osaka) + remote (office presence as needed)

 

Mission

• Build a high-trust, high-performance culture where engineers grow, stay healthy, and deliver sustainably.
• Increase organizational capability through hiring, development, and fair performance systems.
• Create an execution operating system (OKRs, planning, dependency management) that improves predictability without bureaucracy.
• Lead the identification and resolution of challenges that cannot be resolved by the development team alone, in order ensuring the team maintains an effective working environment.
• Balance roadmap speed and technical soundness (reliability, security, scalability, cost) using evidence-based decisions.
• Enable bilingual, multicultural collaboration with clear communication norms and written-first practices.

 

Primary Responsibilities

A) People Leadership, Team Health & Performance (Core)

• Team Health / Conditioning: Monitor workload, engagement signals, working patterns, and psychological safety. Prevent burnout and sustain a healthy pace.
• 1:1s & Growth Plans: Run consistent 1:1s, create individualized growth plans, coach engineers on execution, collaboration, and technical leadership.
• Performance Management (supportive + direct): Set clear expectations, deliver frequent feedback, recognize strong performance, address gaps early with structured support plans, and take decisive action when needed.
• Promotion & Calibration: Drive fair evaluations and promotion support using clear leveling standards; ensure consistency across teams and mitigate language/cultural bias.
• Culture & Communication: Build an environment of candid, respectful feedback. Improve communication quality (written clarity, meeting discipline, conflict resolution) across JP/EN contexts.

B) Hiring System Ownership with HR (Core)

• Partner with Recruiting/HR to define role scorecards and ideal candidate profiles from the field perspective.
• Improve end-to-end hiring: sourcing strategy feedback, interview loop design, interviewer training, pass-through analysis, candidate experience, offer strategy, and closing.
• Build a repeatable hiring machine: pipeline reviews, quality bar consistency, and continuous process improvement.

C) Resource & Budget Management (Core)

• Allocate people, time, budget, and tooling to maximize ROI for product and engineering outcomes.
• Govern external partners/outsourcing: define SOW and acceptance criteria, manage delivery quality, negotiate cost structures (in partnership with Finance/Procurement as applicable).
• Own tool strategy and ROI tracking (including AI/dev productivity tools) with measurable goals.

D) Org Execution System (OKRs + Cross-team) (Core)

• Drive engineering OKRs: creation, alignment to company goals, progress tracking, and course correction.
• Improve cross-team delivery: dependency management, clear ownership boundaries, escalation paths, and communication processes.
• Identify organizational bottlenecks and lead change initiatives (structure, workflow, decision-making, documentation).

E) Technical Tradeoffs & Quality Governance (preferred)

• Facilitate roadmap vs NFR tradeoffs with PdM/PM and technical leaders using risk, data, and operational signals.
• Ensure technical debt discussions are evidence-based and tied to business outcomes.
• Strengthen quality and reliability practices: incident learning and postmortems, sustainable on-call health (if applicable), and continuous improvement using metrics.

 

Requirements (Must)

• Business-level on one language and advanced operational proficiency on other (between Japanese and English (reading/writing/speaking) )
• 5+ years experience in engineering management (people leadership).
• 3+ years experience owning significant parts of engineering hiring (role definition, interviewing, offers/closing, process improvement).
• 5+ years prior hands-on experience building web applications/services (background sufficient for architecture/risk judgment).
• Proven ability to improve team performance, engagement, and retention, not just deliver projects.
• Demonstrated strength in difficult conversations (expectations, conflict, performance gaps) with empathy and clarity.
• Track record of driving organizational change autonomously and delivering measurable outcomes.

 

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to have)

• Experience managing multinational/distributed teams.
• Experience running department-level processes (OKRs, leveling calibration, hiring KPIs).
• Vendor/outsourcing governance and contract/SOW experience.
• Strong partnership experience with PdM/PM in roadmap planning and NFR investment decisions.

 

What Success Looks Like

First 90 days

• Clear baseline of org health: skills map, engagement risks, delivery bottlenecks, hiring funnel diagnosis.
• Stable operating cadence (planning + visibility) without adding unnecessary process.
• Hiring plan aligned with HR, with an interview loop and bar clarity.

6 months

• Improved team health and performance signals (clear expectations, feedback culture, sustainable pace).
• Hiring throughput and quality are more predictable (better pass-through, stronger candidate experience, improved close rate).
• Better delivery reliability: fewer “surprises,” clearer tradeoffs, improved cross-team coordination.

12 months

• Strong internal talent pipeline (growth and promotions), reduced regretted attrition, and strong leadership bench.
• Sustainable velocity with improved technical health (quality/reliability metrics trending better).
• Org-wide execution and communication works smoothly across JP/EN without the EM becoming a single point of failure.

 

Technology Environment 

• Main languages: TypeScript (primary), plus Java/Go/Python as needed
• Backend/Frontend: Node.js/NestJS, React, etc.
• Cloud: AWS (ECS/Fargate/Lambda/etc.) + observability and data tooling
• Tools: GitHub, modern AI-assisted development tools, and standard business collaboration tools

(Specific tools may evolve; we value adaptability and judgment over tool-specific experience.)

 

Work Location

• Japan (Osaka or Tokyo), remote work available
• Must be able to come to the office when necessary