Senior Software Engineer (Data Platform)

Tokyo
No Remote
Full-time
June 12, 2024

About SmartNews

SmartNews is a global leader in redefining information and news discovery, committed to providing users with accurate, timely information and supporting quality journalism. We combine the power of our unique machine-learning technology with the expertise of our first-rate editorial team to bring news that matters to millions of users from our over 3,000 global publishing partners.

Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan, SmartNews has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, and Singapore.

The Team

The Data Platform Team is responsible for building systems that will power the next 5 years of SmartNews data analytics. They develop and maintain common data platforms, ETL pipelines and data analytics infrastructure that can operate with low latency and high reliability while maintaining 99.99% uptime or above.

The Role

As a Data Platform Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring that data within the SmartNews environment is highly available, with minimal latency and correctly transferred. You will be a key architect in building and maintaining systems that will power the data use at SmartNews for the next five years. Your expertise will contribute to the foundation that supports SmartNews' ambitious growth goals.

Your Reponsibilities

Be the team SME expert in Data pipelines
Develop and realize the overall data strategy for the company
Develop and manage ETL/ELT pipelines and infrastructure of analytics databases
Cooperate with the product team, data science team to design data features to enable product improvement and timely business KPI measurements.
Be involved in data technology and security to be able to help design the next generation of data platform infrastructure
Determine the importance of each dataset and take appropriate measures to ensure data reliability and quality according to priority
Improve the reliability and speed of queries for ever-increasing volumes of data
Implement new types of data workflows (e.g. automatic retraining of machine learning models for predicting user churn)
Build dashboards to visualize key metrics

Requirements

Minimum requirements

At least 2 years of team lead experience
Able to prioritize and work on data issues ranging from overall data strategy to detailed data modification
Experience with data warehousing and business intelligence systems
5 years of programming experience (understand multiple languages)
Experience with Hive, Airflow, Scylla, Redis, Elastic search
Experience in development related to Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Clickhouse, Presto/Trino
Experience with data processing related to an app or website.
Experience with Modern Machine Learning technologies
Have architected/implemented a data warehouse
Experience designing and creating data tables
English as the working language
BS degree or above in related fields
Experience with AWS (EC2, Kinesis, EMR, S3, etc.)

Nice to have experiences/skills

Experience in dashboard development with modern tools, such as Tableau or Superset
Experience with infrastructure or data workflows for machine learning
Knowledge of real-time streaming data systems
Strong interest in new big data tools and technologies
Business-level Japanese

Benefits

Benefits available at the SmartNews Tokyo Office

Lunch and snacks prepared daily in our on-site kitchen facility
In-office coffee stand offering single-origin coffees, espresso-based beverages, teas, and other seasonal drinks
SmartSelect, our support program for employee self-development, well-being, and productivity
All healthcare and social insurance required by the Japanese labor law

Visa Sponsorship and Relocation Support

Work visa sponsorship is available for candidates who meet eligibility requirements
To support a smooth transition for candidates who are moving to Japan from overseas, SmartNews partners with a travel service provider

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About SmartNews

Recently crowned Japan's latest tech unicorn, this company runs a wildly successful news service that’s powered by machine learning. It's an engineering-focused company (One of co-founders is an engineer) and they have offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Shanghai, Beijing that are apparently doing quite well too.

The mission of SmartNews is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. Since its inception in 2012, the SmartNews app has been downloaded over 50 million downloads and maintained a monthly active user count of over 20 million.

In addition to being one of the most popular smartphone apps in Japan, SmartNews has worked hard on building their business in the US. They now have partnerships with over 300 major news publications in the US like CBS, Entertainment Weekly, Business Insider, National Geographic and more. They’ve had a great deal of success due to their ML-based sorting and recommendation systems.

SmartNews has a highly diverse development team with many world-class engineers and others working from their offices in Japan,China and the US. They maintain a very strict hiring bar for technical hires and an engineering-driven culture that makes them one of the strongest tech companies in Japan when it comes to technical skill level.

SmartNews is looking to hire the best people regardless of background, so they’re willing to hire people that don’t speak Japanese and (under normal circumstances) bring them to Japan from overseas if necessary. Everyone works together as one team regardless of location, and SmartNews provides everything their employees need to do their best work and maintains a Silicon Valley-inspired culture for engineers in Tokyo.

SmartNews's policies during COVID-19 are as follows:

All interviews are being conducted remotely
Employees are working remotely following the government’s instructions
They've given everyone some monetary incentive to support working from home

Japanese Language Policy
We do not require Japanese language ability in the working environment. We have a language support program if employees want to learn Japanese.
Visa Sponsorship
We support candidates to get a working visa from the start to the end (for JP office joiners).
Paid Leave
Our holidays shall include Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays, and other days designated by the Company.

Annual paid holidays
- 4-10 days of paid holiday will be granted depending on the month in which you join the Company.
- From the second year and onwards, paid holidays will be granted according to the number of years of your employment on April 1st of each year. The number of days granted shall be set forth in the Work Rules.
Other leaves
- Summer holidays
- Year-end and year-beginning holidays
- Special leave for congratulation or condolence (marriage or immediate family death)
- Sick/Injured Child Care Leave
- Family nursing care leave
- Maternity and paternity leave
Benefits
☕️ ChikyuCoffee - Delicious coffee provided by our Barista every day

🍹 Free soft drinks

🌽 SmartKitchen - Healthy organic lunch on a daily basis for free at our cafeteria

👩‍🎓 Foreign language development support

💜 Various social insurance benefits included

🏥 Health insurance

📓 Free book rent from our library collections

🌎 Translation/interpretation support (EN<>JP)
Remote Work
We accept work from home policy during natural disasters and emergency situations. Our company’s working policy during the pandemic follows the government’s recommendations.
Work style
Our engineering and product teams follow the discretionary labor system to better collaborate with members in the US and China.
Diversity
We support diversity in various ways and those are not simply reflected in the quantitative goals.

We have employees with 18 different nationalities. Groups of small gatherings with similar interests are actively communicating across divisions, departments, and regions. We have monthly Global All Hands to share important notes from each region and be aligned globally.

All employees in SmartNews have different personal and professional backgrounds and experiences.
Parents and Family
We are supporting our employees in various ways to help them manage their work better with family care.

We have 10 annual paid leaves (for a child) for employees with children until they enter highschool.

Working from home is encouraged when their family needs care. Employees can freely invite their family to the Smart Kitchen (our corporate kitchen where free lunches are served).

During the working from home period because of the pandemic, employees with small children autonomously held some online sessions for their children such as reading fairy tales and mutual online babysittings.