Engineering Manager

PayPay Card, member of the PayPay Group, embraced the challenge of internationalizing its engineering divisions. Additionally, we are revisiting our technical architecture and strive to make it right, improving scalability, maintainability and performances. To make it happen, we also go through rethinking our organization and work processes as well. For this reason, we are looking for Engineering Managers (EM) with Japanese conversational abilities that not only make the team deliver timely with quality, but also can be a language and cultural bridge between the team and the different stakeholders.

The engineers of your team will mainly be English speakers but your stakeholders include Japanese speakers. Although we are introducing more and more English in our discussions, you will be expected to have frequent communication in Japanese.

This is a rare opportunity to take part in significant organizational changes as well as unprecedented technical challenges. While the company business is quite established, the engineering challenges we are tackling are on par with the hypergrowth style of challenges. You will be able to, and encouraged to, bring your ideas to sharpen our vision, may it be related to technical, organization or human matters.

Tech Stack

We currently work with

• Applications:
  • Backend systems:
    • New systems are implemented in Kotlin + Spring Boot for new systems
    • Existing systems are a mix of Java + Spring Boot or Java EE
    • Service to service communications are using gRPC and Kafka
    • Frontend: Vue.js 3, Nuxt.js, TypeScript
• Infrastructure:
  • AWS-centric, Terraform-managed
  • Grafana & Prometheus for observability
  • OpenSearch for logging
• Other tools:
  • Slack / GitHub / JIRA / Confluence / Google Workspace

Responsibilities

You will be in charge of a Web Backend engineering team. Your main responsibility is to ensure that the team can operate overcoming communication challenges as well as a constantly changing environment. Your future responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Execution: support the team to ensure timely and high-quality deliveries

• Assign team members to appropriate projects, depending on the engineer skill sets and project requirements
• Backup team members to ensure they can progress in their task such as fetching missing information, defusing conflict, handling emergencies, etc
• Coordinate, and if necessary negotiate or arbitrate, with different stakeholders, potentially in Japanese, to ensure that both product and architecture decisions are sustainable and scalable.

Operation: create levers to allow the team to continuously improve from delivery, reliability, and developer experience standpoints

• Identify and address pain points which hinders development, deliveries and developer experience, from a process, tooling and system perspective
• Enhance the development process so that it suits the team and sustains a steady development

Growth: bring the team to the next level to reach a healthy and motivating environment

• Enable people growth with practices such as efficient 1:1
• Support the end-to-end employee lifecycle: from on-boarding to off-boarding, through performance evaluation
• Contribute to the technical roadmap of the team, ensuring that technical debt is tackled

Requirements

To provide a portrait of the candidates we are looking, we would like to establish the following skills as our baseline:

Technical skills: contributing to the implementation

• Has 2 years, or more, of experience of leading web application engineer teams
• Has past experience as software engineer, backend or frontend
• Has proven records of significant contributions to scalable architectures and system designs
• Has solid tasks definition and breakdown skills

Soft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholders

• Has good stakeholder management, coordination and conflict handling skills
• Speaks and writes conversational Japanese. It is essential that managers can discuss with non-English speakers.

Leadership: taking the team to the next level

• Focuses on people growth success
• Is able to efficiently follow-up the progress, and blockers, for all on-going tasks
• Has a genuine care for continuous improvement and developer experience
• Has interviewing experience

Nice to haves

While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.

Technical skills: contributing to the implementation

• Has good awareness regarding security matters
• Has domain driven development experience
• Has credit card industry implementation experience, specifically PCI-DSS compliant implementation

Soft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholders

• Is able to drive the team though a quickly changing environment
• Is able to navigate meeting dynamics, from letting the attendees speaking up to steering back the conversation

Leadership: taking the team to the next level

• Is inclined to target engineering excellency
• Is versed in observability
• Is an example of good work ethics, including “Diversity & Inclusion”