Head of Platform Engineering and SRE Department

Overview

Our company offers a range of services used by many users, including the automatic household accounting and asset management service "Money Forward ME" and the business-oriented cloud service "Money Forward Cloud." We also implement technologies such as "account aggregation" and "Money Forward ID," a single sign-on system, which support these services. Most of these services and features are developed in-house, not only in Japan but also at our overseas locations, Money Forward Vietnam and Money Forward India.

The mission of the Platform Engineering and SRE Department is to stabilize the services provided by Money Forward and maximize productivity in development through the platforms and technical support for the services developed by Money Forward.

With the expansion and globalization of our development organization, we are seeking a person responsible for the entire product platform to further strengthen Platform Engineering and SRE Department Department.

Main Responsibilities

You will be responsible for the entire product platform that provides services to users, you will be directly reporting to the executive officer and be entrusted with the following:

• Stable Operation of the Platform : Enhance the availability of the platform and prevent large-scale failures as much as possible. Improve response capabilities in the event of incidents. Decide and implement specific measures to improve availability and incident response (e.g., setting up dashboards with Datadog).
• Accountability for Infrastructure: Understand the scope of work delegated to subordinate managers and fulfill accountability regarding workload and content. Support subordinate managers to ensure they can do the same. Ensure accountability for parts delegated to the development department (e.g., Datadog, AWS) and be able to clearly explain whether infrastructure costs per department are appropriate.
• Roadmap Formulation for Platform Engineering: Design platform engineering to improve developer experience and productivity, and agree on the future vision with the CTO/VPoE/CISO.
• SRE Organization Management and Member Development: Assign responsibilities to all managers without overlap and support them to achieve results within six months.

Required Skills and Experience

• Leadership and Management: Experience in project management, planning and executing projects across multiple teams, and leading teams towards success.
• Organizational Management: Appropriately allocate personnel and support and promote the growth of the organization and its members.
• Leadership: Demonstrate and promote change both inside and outside the division.
• Communication Skills: Build trust with management and other departments, understand intentions, and lead to consensus building.
• Problem-Solving Skills: Analyze complex problems in collaboration with others and lead to appropriate solutions.
• Technical Background: Experience and knowledge in the following areas:
  • Building and operating container environments using Kubernetes
  • Building and operating infrastructure using AWS services
  • Experience in designing, operating, maintaining, improving, and handling failures of web services
  • Knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering
  • Experience in organizational management within a DevOps culture

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Strategic planning ability (understanding company and business challenges and goals, thinking of a rational path for the direction of one's organization, and demonstrating it to stakeholders)
• Experience in managing organizations with more than two layers
• Experience in building and operating multi-tenant Kubernetes
• Extensive experience in handling failures in web services
• Experience as an SRE in a web service company
• Experience operating large-scale services on AWS
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines
• Experience in monitoring implementation and operation of web services
• Experience in capacity planning and tuning of web services
• Experience migrating from on-premise to cloud environments
• Experience automating tasks like Toil by writing code
• Experience operating MySQL (version upgrades, replication knowledge, etc.)
• Experience in AI development or using AI tools for development
• 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. 

Language Requirements

• Fluent in English
• Fluent in Japanese is a big plus

Tech Stack

The current technology stack we use is as follows. However, we are open to challenging and adopting more valuable and optimal technologies to support our ever-evolving development organization.

• Development Languages/Frameworks: Rails, Go, Kotlin, Java, React, Next.js, etc.
• Data Stores: MySQL (Aurora), Redis, Memcached
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS (ALB, EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, ElastiCache, EKS...), GCP, Sakura Internet, etc.
• Middleware: Nginx, Envoy, Squid, Unicorn, Puma

Tools

• CI/CD: CircleCI, ArgoCD, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
• Monitoring: Datadog, Logstash, Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Rollbar
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible
• Development Environment: Docker, Telepresence
• Ticket Management: JIRA
• Communication: Slack, Zoom
• Code Management: GitHub

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.
• 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.