Principal Engineer, Developer Experience (DevEx)

Overview

As Money Forward continues to scale our product portfolio and engineering organization, strengthening developer productivity has become a strategic priority for the CTO Office and the broader MF Engineering group.

We are evolving our developer experience, platforms, and governance to support increasingly complex products and a growing number of engineers in Japan and Vietnam.

To accelerate this transformation, we are looking for a Principal Engineer who can take ownership of developer productivity as a company-wide capability.

You will be a key partner to the CTO, engineering leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders in defining and executing this strategy.

Responsibilities and Duties

You will lead developer productivity and developer experience initiatives across Money Forward Cloud and the wider group, working closely with engineering teams in Japan and Vietnam, the CISO and PRE/SRE organizations, as well as Product and management. While architecture and governance leaders own company-wide technical design, you will own how productively developers across the company work and how smoothly they can deliver high-quality software. 

• Bridge the CTO, engineering leadership, and Product to surface real productivity problems, propose data-informed solutions, and align on which value areas to prioritize and invest in first. 
• Make full use of DFP (our Backstage-based developer portal) and evolve it where it provides leverage—so product teams can self-serve common needs such as templates, shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, standard patterns, and golden paths—treating it as one productivity lever rather than a goal in itself. 
• Define and instrument engineering productivity: select appropriate metrics (such as DORA, SPACE, or team-specific indicators), measure honestly using our productivity-data stack (Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio), and use these insights to identify friction points and demonstrate impact. 
• Lead developer-experience and tooling programs end-to-end, including developer tooling, CI/CD and build-time improvements, internal documentation and templates, and especially the rollout of AI tools, agents, and workflows on our internal AI Platform—covering technical design, implementation, and adoption. 
• Identify practices that work well in specific teams and scale them across the organization by codifying patterns, sharing knowledge, and driving adoption through communication, enablement, and change management. 
• Partner with the CISO and PRE/SRE organizations on security and reliability initiatives that touch developer experience, ensuring secure and reliable defaults without owning those mandates directly. 
• Partner with the FinOps owner to embed cost awareness into developer tooling and golden paths, helping teams make cost-effective architectural and operational choices while not owning the overall cost program yourself. 
• Support the architecture and governance review process where it intersects with developer experience, ensuring that standards and guidelines are practical, discoverable, and easy for teams to adopt. 
• Communicate clearly and credibly with both engineers and executives in English and Japanese, including proposals, status updates, decision records, post-implementation reviews, and success stories.  

Required Skills and Experience

• Extensive experience as a senior or principal-level engineer leading cross-team or organization-wide initiatives related to developer productivity, platform engineering, or developer experience. 
• Strong hands-on experience with modern CI/CD pipelines, build and test automation, and developer tooling for cloud-native applications. 
• Practical experience designing and operating internal developer platforms or portals (e.g., Backstage or similar), including defining golden paths, templates, and shared services. 
• Solid understanding of software engineering metrics and productivity frameworks (e.g., DORA, SPACE), including the ability to design meaningful metrics and avoid misuse. 
• Experience working with data pipelines and analytics tools (e.g., Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio or equivalents) to collect, transform, and visualize engineering data. 
• Proven track record of partnering with security, reliability, and operations teams to embed good practices into development workflows. 
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical design, run experiments, and deliver incremental improvements in complex, multi-team environments. 
• Excellent communication skills in both Japanese and English, with the ability to tailor messages to engineers, managers, and executives.  

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience building or operating large-scale, multi-language or multi-region engineering organizations, especially involving Japan and other countries (e.g., Vietnam). 
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., code generation, code review, test generation) or implementing AI workflows into existing software delivery processes. 
• Familiarity with FinOps or cost-optimization practices in cloud environments, especially as they relate to developer workflows and platform design. 
• Experience in platform engineering, SRE, or PRE (Production Reliability Engineering), particularly where it intersects with developer experience and enablement. 
• Background in driving organizational change, including rolling out new standards, processes, or platforms across many teams and measuring adoption and impact. 
• Contributions to engineering communities (e.g., open-source projects, tech blogs, conferences) focused on productivity, developer experience, or platform engineering.  
• Experience in AI development and/or experience in using AI tools to improve development processes.
  • Money Forward is at a major turning point, shifting "from Cloud to AI." We are currently driving "AX (AI Transformation)"—the next step beyond DX—with the goal of providing "Digital Workers," where AI agents autonomously execute tasks. As we enter a phase of evolving into Japan's No. 1 back-office AI company by integrating AI agents into all of our products in the future, we are looking for individuals who can contribute to AI-driven development and value creation.

Language Requirements

• Japanese Language Requirements 
  Business level (fluent, capable of handling communication with clients in Japanese). You should be able to participate in technical and non-technical discussions, lead meetings, and produce written documentation in Japanese. 
• English Language Requirements 
  Business level (fluent, capable of handling communication with clients in English). You should be able to collaborate effectively with global members, lead discussions, and produce technical documents in English. 

Technology Stack

• Web Server-side： 
  　- Languages / Frameworks：Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Go, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, PHP, etc. 
  　- Frameworks / Libraries：Spring Boot, Rails, Next.js, React, etc.
• Database： 
  　- RDBMS / NoSQL：MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
• Middleware： 
  　- Containers / Web / Others：Docker, Nginx, Kafka, etc.
• Platform： 
  　- Cloud / Infra：AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, on-premise environments, etc.
• Data / Analytics： 
  　- Data Pipeline / Analytics：Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio, etc.
• Developer Experience / Internal Platform： 
  　- Developer Portal / Platform：Backstage-based internal developer portal (DFP), internal AI platform, internal CI/CD platform, etc. 

Tools Used

• Repository Management： 
  　- GitHub, GitLab (depending on team)
• CI/CD： 
  　- GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, Argo CD, etc.
• Development Environment： 
  　- Docker, Terraform, Terraform Enterprise, local development environments, VS Code and other IDEs, etc.
• Monitoring / Logging： 
  　- DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, etc.
• Project Management： 
  　- Jira, Notion, Confluence, etc.
• Communication： 
  　- Slack, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Meet), etc.
• Security： 
  　- Dependabot, Snyk, security scanning tools integrated into CI/CD, etc.  

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.