This position is closed and is no longer accepting applications.

Software Engineer, Backend (Content Provider Engineering)

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
  • 💴 No salary range given
  • 🏡 Partially remote
  • 🧪 3+ years experience required
  • 💬 Business Japanese
  • 🌏 Apply from abroad
  • 🧳 Relocate to Japan

About SmartNews

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

Created to deliver high-quality news from a wide variety of trusted publishers in one place, the SmartNews team works tirelessly to help readers feel good about being informed.

Key benefits

  • Your ideas matter
  • International team

About the position

In this role, your mission will be to act as the bridge between our many content partners and our products. You will lead design and implementation of key platforms providing smooth content ingestion, management and resilient data pipelines to measure content performance and support revenue share as part of our Media Prosper Program. Your primary focus will be on developing features and building the backend infrastructure for our content provider platforms. However, you will also contribute to frontend development for external partner-facing websites and contribute across the entire news pipeline from ingestion to delivery as opportunities arise, ensuring we can deliver great contents to our users at every stage of the product.

The Team

Own, build, and maintain our content provider-facing platforms, enabling SmartNews to continue providing top content from leading news publishers, retail brands, and more. Our relationships with our content providers are key to our success, and we are dedicated to delivering a top-quality experience throughout their journey with us—from content ingestion to analytics, reporting, and payments.

Responsibilities

  • Own the development and maintenance of a key partner platform in our premium content domain
  • Design, build, test, deploy, maintain, and improve backend systems that support content ingestion and management at scale
  • Flexibly develop across backend and web frontend as needed to enhance and improve platform functionality.
  • Participate in system design, code reviews, and on-call rotation to maintain high-quality standards for code and ensure the reliability of mission-critical systems.
  • Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to prioritize, plan, and successfully deliver new products to our customers.

Requirements

  • 3+ years of backend software development experience; 1+ year in web frontend or full-stack development.
  • Proficient in Java/Kotlin programming languages.
  • Hands-on experience in designing, building, testing, and maintaining large-scale backend systems, with expertise in CI/CD practices and microservices architecture using Docker/Kubernetes.
  • Exceptional communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Business level communication in Japanese.

Nice to haves

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

  • 1 year or more in a tech lead role
  • Knowledge of and experience using AWS cloud resources

Meet SmartNews's Developers

Cortland recently joined SmartNews as an engineering manager, where he leads a six person team. He talks about what drew him to the company, his role as a manager, and how they use matrix management to maximize their engineers’ success.

Read their story...

YuCheng is a senior software engineer at SmartNews. He explains the freedom he enjoys at SmartNews: not only from a technical perspective, but also the influence he can have over the direction of the product.

Read their story...

When Robert joined SmartNews as a software engineer, most of his colleagues were Japanese. Since then, it’s grown into an international organization where English is predominantly used.

Read their story...

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