Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure

Tokyo
Partial Remote
Full-time
May 13, 2022

Responsibilities

Lead our world-wide team of engineers to operational excellence. Discover modern best practices and make them available through productivity-increasing tooling
Empower teams to provide reliable systems. Facilitate the operation of service level objectives (SLO), on-call rotations and blameless post-mortems
Drive the construction of a multi-regional cloud-native infrastructure that delivers performance to our global user base
Optimize the processes for trimming down infrastructure costs and tuning our fleet of instances for maximum efficiency

Minimum Qualifications

Administration experience in container orchestration platforms, preferably using Kubernetes and demonstrated by the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certificate
Experience in observability (monitoring, logging and tracing) for cloud-based environments, using CNCF tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, Jaeger or SaaS tools such as Datadog
Expertise in maintaining self-service CI/CD platforms and supporting techniques like Trunk-Based development, GitOps-based deployments or automated canary releases
Production experience in at least one programming language, for example Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript
Business level communication in English

Preferred Skills and experience

Strong knowledge of fundamental AWS services with a certification as an AWS Associate or above
Proficiency in operating public cloud services using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
Passion to stay up-to-date with latest industry topics in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), DevOps and the AWS Well-Architected Framework
Knowledge of common application architecture patterns: distributed systems, microservices, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, and others

Benefits and Perks

Support programs for self-improvement and career development (language learning, etc.)
SmartKitchen - Healthy lunch on a daily basis for free (Tokyo Office)
ChikyuCoffee - Delicious coffee provided by our Barista every day (Tokyo Office)
transportation coverage (maximum 50,000 yen)
Various social insurance benefits included

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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.