We build products that make websites, apps, and media multilingual:
- WOVN.io – websites
- WOVN.app – smartphone apps
- WOVN.video – video subtitles
Our services are used by large enterprises and global companies to support international expansion and non-Japanese users. Over 18,000 websites and apps use WOVN today. We focus on making localization simple and effective without sacrificing quality or usability.
Work style and philosophy
We use LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) with a single product backlog shared across teams. Backlog items come from developers as well as the PO, and are refined and prioritized together.
- Two-week sprints
- Cross-functional teams
- More on LeSS
We use Slack, Miro, Jira, Confluence, and Figma, but prefer working face-to-face. We’re fully in-office, relying on whiteboards, mob programming, and direct conversations over async tools.
We also actively use AI agents in our workflow. Candidates should be open to working with AI as part of the development process.
A friendly and supportive environment
We’re not just passionate about hard technical ability, and put an emphasis on soft skills as well. This can be felt through small things, like saying “Good morning” to each other on Slack, or through our code review guidelines that don’t just talk about engineering considerations but also emotional ones.
We reduce scope rather than working overtime
We embrace the agile methodology scrum, using a kanban board to track tasks. While we do create estimates, we understand that it’s impossible to always create accurate estimates, and we’re comfortable with reducing scope of our sprints when this happens. We’re focused on long term productivity, and so don’t work overtime.
Great mobility from within
As a fast growing company, our team is constantly expanding. We like to promote from within, and so there will be opportunities for you to take on new responsibilities and grow your career.
Our service is also incredibly broad, encompassing such varied things as a JavaScript widget, server-side middlewares, and mobile and desktop applications. We encourage our engineers to follow their interests, and so if you’re someone who wants to dabble with new technologies, you’ll have the chance to do so.
A huge scale for a small team
WOVN’s backend serves hundreds of requests per second and our database contains billions of records. Thanks to using modern technology, we’ve been able to do this with a relatively small team. If you’re someone who enjoys thinking about performance, there will be plenty of interesting challenges for you.
We embrace diversity
80% of our engineers are from abroad, hailing from countries such as Russia, Guatemala, United States, Canada, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, France, Germany, and Norway. We welcome anyone overseas looking to relocate to Japan to apply and help make our team even more culturally diverse.
Though our founders are Japanese, we’re not your typical salaryman gig. We encourage our employees to express their individuality. This can be as basic as how you dress, we don’t care if you have piercings or tattoos, and extends to encouraging everyone contributing their own viewpoints about how the business should be run and improved.
We default to English
The engineering team uses English as our common language. Being a company with many Japanese clients, much of our business staff is Japanese, though many of them are bilingual as well. As an engineer, you won’t be expected to know Japanese, though of course there’ll be opportunities if you want to use it. When necessary, we employ translation, and even have interpreters on staff that can participate in meetings.
