We’re the company behind Komoju, a developer friendly API to integrate Japanese payments, who’s customers include the digital distribution platform Steam and the gaming company Blizzard. We’re also active in the gaming industry, having published the RPG Maker franchise and various shooting games.
Developer-centric, flat, inclusive culture
The engineering team has a big say in a lot of the product decisions. As a company, we listens to the engineering team. So you’ll not just be told what to do, but also help us innovate and bring your own ideas for improving the company and our products.
To encourage innovation, we have a flat, inclusive culture that is constantly evaluating itself. We believe that each team member brings something unique to the team, and that the way we develop is ever evolving as we continue to grow. We’re largely a self organizing engineering culture, which means engineers have both a stake and ownership in what they work on. Engineers play to their strengths, but are also able to invest in areas where they want to grow within the team.
International at our core
Our founder is Canadian, and about 50% of our employees are non-Japanese. In the engineering team, we use English as our common language, and throughout the company, many people are bilingual.
Being an international company we know the importance of bilingualism. We offer all employees a choice between English and Japanese lessons.
To instill an international mindset, we also offer a “work abroad” program. The work abroad program enables a few employees every year to work anywhere in the world for two weeks. We’ll fund the trip.
We hire international software developers not yet based in Japan. You’ll have the option to work from your own country, or if you’d like to relocate here, we will help you get set up in Japan, including arranging temporary accommodation for you, and helping you to secure a permanent residence. See “Our response to COVID-19” for an update regarding the current situation.
Passionate about technology
Developers at Degica are passionate about their craft. To foster innovation, we have a monthly open hack day, where you can work on whatever you want. It could be something like trying a new programming language or tool, but sometimes developers create totally new tools, which become adopted by the company.
An example of this is Kaiser, a Docker Compose like tool that’s specifically focused on Ruby on Rails applications. When you’re using Docker Compose for running Rails applications, particularly those using microservices, it can get quite complicated, and require you to write a ton on YAML. But Kaiser makes it super simple to run such Rails applications.
We also sponsor developer conferences like RubyKaigi and EuRoKo, and also host KichijojiKaigi, a monthly gathering to discuss technology and programming.
Fully Remote
Degica has embraced remote work, and you can work fully remote from anywhere. We still have an office which you can use if you’d like to, but we don’t mandate you coming to it. This extends to you working from outside of Japan. While we’re still looking for some overlap with Japanese business hours, you can otherwise work from whatever country you’d like.
Our hiring process
We’ve designed our hiring process to allow you to highlight what you can bring to our team.
It starts with you submitting your resume to us, after which it will be reviewed by our engineers. Rather than just your work history, we’re looking for something that demonstrates a passion for programming. This could be a personal project or open source contributions for instance. We want to work with people who love their trade, and work to improve their skills.
Assuming you pass the initial screening, we’ll invite you to an interview. For the interview, we’ll ask you to present to us something that you’ve built and can speak passionately about. Our engineers will then ask you open ended questions about what you’ve built. We’ve found this approach allows you to highlight your strengths to us, and demonstrate how you’d fit into the team.
After you pass two rounds of interviews, we’ll typically make an offer.
Our response to COVID-19
Most of our big clients are in the gaming industry, and the COVID-19 situation has meant that our merchants are seeing record volumes. Because of this, we’re actually ramping up our hiring efforts to help handle all the extra traffic we’re receiving.
We’ve moved to working completely remotely. After COVID-19 subsides, we’ll reopen our office for those who would like to use it, but you’ll still have the option to work from wherever you’d like.
If you’re an international developer looking to relocate to Japan in the long term, we’re still open to hiring you. However, the current situation makes it infeasible to relocate to Japan, so until travel restrictions are lifted, we’ll remotely onboard you on a contract basis. Once travel restrictions are lifted, we will apply for a working visa, and hire you as a normal employee.
