Lead the Tokyo-based Applications Group engineering team of 5, building the products that sit at the core of the Treasure Data customer value proposition. The team ships end-to-end across the backend services and frontend surfaces that power how marketers define and compose audience segments, and orchestrate marketing campaign decisioning logic across activation channels.
Responsibilities
This role is structured as the local leader of a Japan-based team operating inside a distributed North American and Asian workforce. You will be the day-to-day owner of team health, delivery, and technical sustainability for the team. Leaning on an async-first operating model and AI coding agents as force multipliers. We look for managers who balance leadership with agility. This role involves occasional individual contributor work alongside managing the team.
People
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Manage, coach, and grow a team of engineers of mixed seniority. Run 1:1s, performance management, career development, and partner with your manager on leveling and compensation cycles.
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Drive cross-training of the team from current skill sets toward full-stack capability and increasing the team’s AI-assisted engineering fluency while partnering with senior ICs on a learning plan, balancing against delivery, and measuring progress.
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Champion a sustainable and predictable working cadence where work life balance is prioritized.
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Lead hiring for the Tokyo team — sourcing partnership, interview design, debrief facilitation, and offer recommendations — in close partnership with Talent Acquisition and your manager.
Delivery
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Own sprint planning, commitments, and delivery. Partner with product managers to translate roadmap priorities into executable sprints. Apply engineering judgment to scope by pushing back on overconfident estimates and surfacing risk early.
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Provide architectural gut-checks during design discussions; escalate to senior ICs or cross-team architects when deeper review is warranted.
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Triage customer escalations and, with AI coding agents, route, fix, or pick up lower-priority tech debt and maintenance directly, and serve as an escalation point on the on-call rotation.
Process & Collaboration
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Partner with cross-functional roles in the JP-overlap timezone band (e.g., go-to-market, customer support) — translate customer and market signals into clear requirements, scope, and verification gates before sprint commitment.
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Establish an async-first operating rhythm across a distributed North American and Asian workforce. Own written status, decision records, and retrospectives so decisions move without unnecessary live overlap.
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Partner with peer engineering managers across the distributed workforce — negotiate staffing, surface cross-team dependencies early, and keep your team’s health, performance, and capacity legible in decisions made outside your time zone.
Requirements
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8+ years of software engineering industry experience, having reached Staff Engineer (or equivalent) level in a prior role, with 3+ years in people management.
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Track record of managing engineers of mixed seniority through sprint-based delivery including 1:1s, coaching, career development, and performance conversations handled with candor and respect.
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Hands-on technical depth in building and maintaining web application systems — borne from prior individual-contributor experience or current AI-assisted development — sufficient to review designs, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and contribute code on tech-debt and maintenance work.
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Fluency with AI coding agents in daily engineering work, plus the judgment to lead a team that ships with them — knowing where agentic development accelerates work and where it needs human review.
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Fluent Japanese speaking & writing required with business English skill.
