Software Engineering Manager

Our company is undergoing a major technical and organizational evolution as we scale our products and modernize our architecture. We are investing heavily in improving reliability, performance, and development speed, while transitioning toward a global engineering culture. As part of this shift, we are hiring Engineering Managers who can operate effectively in an international environment and help bridge communication between English-speaking engineers and Japanese-speaking stakeholders.

This is a rare chance to influence technical strategy, organizational design, and engineering culture in a company with a large user base and rapidly growing infrastructure needs. You will have the freedom to suggest improvements across technology, process, and team operations.

Tech Environment (Summary)

Applications

• Backend services mainly built in Kotlin + Spring Boot
• Legacy systems in Java (Spring Boot / Java EE)
• Service-to-service communication using gRPC and Kafka
• Frontend stack: TypeScript, Vue 3, Nuxt.js

Infrastructure & Tooling

• AWS as the primary platform
• Terraform for IaC
• Grafana / Prometheus for metrics and monitoring
• OpenSearch for logs
• Collaboration tools: Slack / GitHub / JIRA / Confluence / Google Workspace

Role Overview

You will lead a backend development team responsible for large-scale web systems. Your goal is to empower engineers to deliver consistently despite rapid changes, shifting priorities, and multilingual communication.

Key Responsibilities

1. Delivery & Execution

• Ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple projects
• Assign work aligned with each engineer’s strengths
• Step in to unblock issues: missing information, cross-team friction, urgent escalations
• Facilitate communication and negotiation with stakeholders (often in Japanese)
• Influence product and architecture decisions to maintain scalability and technical soundness

2. Operations & Process Improvement

• Identify bottlenecks in development workflow, tooling, and system behavior
• Improve team processes to maintain predictable delivery
• Drive changes that enhance developer experience and reliability
• Promote data-driven improvements using metrics and observability

3. People Leadership & Team Development

• Run effective 1:1s and career development discussions
• Support onboarding, performance reviews, and general team health
• Encourage a culture of continuous improvement
• Help prioritize and address technical debt
• Contribute to hiring and interviewing

Requirements (Baseline)

Technical Background

• At least 2 years of experience managing engineering teams for web applications
• Former software engineer (backend or frontend)
• Solid understanding of designing scalable systems
• Strong ability to break down complex tasks and define execution plans

Soft Skills

• Capable of navigating multi-stakeholder environments
• Skilled in negotiation, coordination, and conflict resolution
• Comfortable communicating in conversational Japanese + business-level English

Leadership

• Passion for people development
• Strong follow-up skills; can track progress and blockers across many tasks
• Focus on improving developer experience and long-term technical quality
• Experience conducting interviews