Engineering Manager (Platform Microservices - Money Forward X, Tokyo)

*This position is employed by Money Forward, Inc. and seconded to Money Forward X Co., Ltd. with evaluation systems and benefits aligned with Money Forward.

Overview

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Platform Microservices team, responsible for designing, building, and operating scalable, reliable, and reusable backend services that power multiple products.

This role combines strong technical leadership with people management and platform thinking. You will lead a team responsible for building microservices, shared platform capabilities, and backend systems that enable product teams to move faster while maintaining high standards of reliability, scalability, and security.

You will work closely with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver robust, cloud-native services using modern architectures and best practices.

Responsibilities and Duties

People Management & Leadership:

• Manage and lead a team of 8–12 engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and support to foster professional growth.
• Develop and maintain a high-performing and motivated engineering team.
• Establish and communicate clear team goals, expectations, and deliverables.
• Maintain a ratio of 7:3 between team and technical management, ensuring a balance between leadership and hands-on technical contributions.

Technical Leadership & Architecture:

• Provide technical leadership in designing and evolving scalable microservices architecture.
• Define and enforce best practices for service design, API contracts, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Drive development of reusable platform services and shared components to improve engineering velocity.
• Ensure high availability, scalability, and performance of microservices in production environments.

Collaboration & Delivery:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive technical initiatives and projects to successful completion.
• Ensure the timely and successful delivery of engineering projects by managing resources, timelines, and priorities.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to align engineering efforts with business goals.

Operations & Best Practices:

• Promote best practices in CI/CD, testing (unit, integration), and deployment strategies.
• Work closely with SRE/Infrastructure teams to improve observability (monitoring, logging, tracing).
• Lead incident management, root cause analysis, and postmortems for production issues.
• Drive cloud-native architecture adoption using containerization and orchestration.
• Ensure security best practices are followed across services (authentication, authorization, secrets management).

Required Skills and Experience

Experience & Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Proven experience managing engineering teams, with a focus on team sizes ranging from 8–12 members.
• Minimum 5+ years of hands-on software development experience.
• Minimum 3+ years of hands-on management experience.

Technical Expertise:

• Strong background in software development, system architecture, and distributed system design.
• Hands-on experience designing and building microservices-based architectures.
• Proficiency in cloud platforms, especially AWS.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments.
• Experience with API design (REST/gRPC), service communication patterns, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with messaging/streaming systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
• Strong programming experience in Kotlin/Java (or similar backend languages).
• Experience with scalability, performance tuning, and fault-tolerant system design.

Soft Skills:

• Self-motivated and eager to learn and stay updated with new technologies.

Preferred Skills and Experience

Experience in AI development and/or experience in using AI tools to improve development processes.

Money Forward recently announced our AI Strategy roadmap which focuses on improving AI-driven operational efficiencies, as well as integrating AI agents into our products to deliver better value to our users. (More information here)

Language Requirements

• English: Business level (TOEIC 700 or above, or equivalent English communication proficiency)
• Japanese: Conversational and above preferred

*Note: Please consult with us if you have certifications or experience other than TOEIC that demonstrate your English proficiency.
Examples: Eiken Grade Pre-1, Eiken Grade 2 (Eiken CSE score 1950 or above), TOEFL iBT 60 or above, IELTS 5.0 or above, Cambridge English Qualifications B2 First (FCE), etc.

Technology Stack

Core Technology Stack

• Languages: Kotlin, Java (Strong experience required)
• Cloud Platform: AWS
• Orchestration & Containers: Kubernetes, Docker (Containerization)
• API / Communication: REST, gRPC, API Gateways (Rate limiting, Auth)
• Messaging & Streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Architecture: Microservices, Event-driven Architecture, Distributed Systems

DevOps & Infrastructure

• CI/CD: CI/CD Pipelines (Best practices in testing and deployment)
• Observability (Good to Have): Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry (Monitoring, Logging, Tracing)
• Service Mesh (Good to Have): Istio, Linkerd
• Security: Authentication, Authorization, Secrets Management

Work Environment

At Money Forward, we provide an environment where we can create world-class services together, and we are looking forward to welcoming you.

• Provided PC Specs: We provide PCs equipped with the latest CPUs (MacOS or Windows). Custom-made PCs tailored to business requirements and replacements with the latest OS are also possible.
• Systems to Enhance the Development Environment: Peripheral devices necessary for work (such as displays, mice, keyboards) can be purchased as office supplies. Generally, you can choose from standard products (catalog), and if conditions are met, you can apply for non-standard products as well. (*Excluding certain group companies)
• Money Forward Library: We have a library system where you can freely borrow books, ranging from technical books to management books. Desired books can be purchased at the company's expense.
• Referral Driven: We cover the cost of recruitment meals. There is a referral reward system.
• Conference Participation Support: The company partially covers participation in domestic and international conferences, such as RubyKaigi and Google I/O.