I've spoken with international software developers working at some of Japan's most interesting tech companies so that I can share with you what it's really like working there.
Ning “Spike” Li shares how his proactive stance helped grow Colorkrew’s team, expand its product line, and earn him the title of CTO.
Read his story...Mike Rudling talks about his passion for creating great developer experiences, and compares his experience at amptalk with his decade in the Bay Area startup scene.
Read his story...Muhammad Denaw, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Komoju, talks about his work and shares how Komoju's trust and support propelled him to a promotion.
Read his story...Product Engineer Jackson To shares his thoughts about Alpaca's mission statement, its financial education platform, and the developer-centered work environment.
Read his story...Russell Cole is an Engineering Manager at MeetsMore. Originally from the UK and with 18 years of previous experience, he explains how the freedom and flexibility that MeetsMore gives its engineers has contributed to its success.
Read his story...Kostas Mavrikis left the Netherlands to join Money Forward in October 2023. As the first non-Japanese speaker in the Fukuoka office, he's been taking the initiative on Money Forward's Englishnization program, as well as introducing Kotlin, Scrumban, and European-style coffee meetings to his team.
Read his story...Jaiyam joined Rapyuta Robotics as a perception engineer, hoping to impact the future through developing products. He talks about Rapyuta’s values and how he became the systems lead of their ASRS (a type of warehouse automation technology) solution.
Read his story...SĂ©bastien is a developer at Lunaris, where he is in charge of developing and maintaining their ecommerce site, Solaris Japan, and the related applications. He talks about what makes Lunaris stand out as a workplace and how he turned a part-time opportunity into his current role.
Read his story...Jos is a senior software engineer and team lead of the payments and collections team at Kraken. He is also a line manager and a tech lead. Jos tells us about the environment at Kraken, what his job involves, and what makes working there so rewarding.
Read his story...Nicole joined KOMOJU in 2020, and worked her way up to be technical lead of the merchant management team. She shares her journey, how KOMOJU supported her career growth and how the company is adapting to its growing needs.
Read her story...Paul is the AI Lead at EARTHBRAIN, where he’s been tasked with building out their AI roadmap and AI team. He talks about the opportunities for AI technologies in the construction industry, what sort of team he hopes to build and what projects he expects to be working on.
Read his story...Xyza talks about working for Recursive, a Japan-based AI company with an exciting mission related to sustainability. She shares her journey, how they’ve supported her, and the company’s working culture.
Read her story...Gloria recently joined Shippio, starting her engineering manager career after previously working as a security engineer. She talks about her role, how the transition went, the company culture, and how she’s helping to shape their security processes.
Read her story...Grace started her career as a software developer in the Philippines but discovered her passion for QA when she moved to Japan. As Yaraku's first QA Engineer, not only does she perform the QA herself, Grace also designed Yaraku’s official QA process.
Read her story...Chris Ackermann started his career in logistics, where he pushed to improve conditions for operators. Rebooting his career as a software developer at Shippio, he once again pursues his passion of revolutionising the logistics industry.
Read his story...At Scoville, Ellen works with a global team to develop a new management product for Japan’s visiting nursing industry. She talks about what drew her to Scoville, and the highlights and challenges of her work.
Read her story...Sau Yee started her career in the IT industry in data analysis, but her curiosity drew her to switch career tracks to software engineering. She began her software engineering career at HENNGE, where she leverages her experience to deliver a better result for the business and customers.
Read Her story...Eurico is the CTO of Spider Labs, whose ad fraud detection tool handles billions of requests and terabytes of data on a daily basis. The Elixir programming language has been instrumental in helping them reach this scale.
Read his story...Adrian came to Japan to join PayPay as an Android Engineer. As the app has grown in scope, refactoring the codebase to ensure development can continue at a rapid pace has been a big part of his job.
Read his story...Shilei started working on PayPay before it launched, and has seen it grow into a product used by tens of millions of users. He explains how diversity has helped them overcome challenges, and what PayPay is looking for in candidates.
Read his story...Yoseph joined PayPay after being attracted to their mission of making Japan a cashless society. As an iOS Engineer, he originally joined their iOS feature team, but now works on their platform team, creating an internal SDK for their iOS and Android apps.
Read his story...Ashwini leads one of PayPay’s payment sub-teams. She got there by doing something she’s done throughout her career: identifying something she wants to do and asking to do it.
Read her story...Two years after graduating from university, Luis joined RESTAR as a full stack developer. He shares his experience working there, and talks about the company's culture of growing together as a team.
Read his story...Lukas Reineke is a team lead at HENNGE, where he splits his time between engineering work and management tasks. He explains how the freedom he has at HENNGE makes it a great working environment.
Read his story...Ray Wong interned at HENNGE while he was in university. He had such a good experience that he joined them as a frontend engineer after graduating.
Read his story...Zac Davison is living in Berlin but works for the Japanese startup MeetsMore, as tech lead of their Foundation team. He explains what the team does, and how he enables them to be more productive.
Read his story...Javier Blanco talks about what it’s like being an Android developer at Drivemode, including the international culture, flexible environment, and the ability to shape the direction of the product.
Read his story...Tompee Balauag describes what it’s like to work as an Android developer at Drivemode, where he and the other developers regularly push the limits of Android devices.
Read his story...Nigel was fresh out of college when he joined KOMOJU as a developer. He's now risen to tech lead, where he's helped build out their payment platform while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Read his story...Ryoko started her career as a typical Japanese office worker, but went through a dramatic career change, joining Givery as a Frontend Engineer where she speaks almost exclusively in English.
Read her story...Since joining Givery’s HR Tech division as an engineering manager two years ago, Wil Andrade has helped scale their engineering team from nine to twenty-four engineers. Wil shares how he's not only grown a team, but provided an environment where no one wants to quit.
Read his story...John Joe, a backend engineer at Givery, explains how the company’s relaxed culture allows developers to drive the product forward, giving them autonomy to pursue tasks like refactoring that don’t directly deliver immediate business value.
Read his story...Polly Sutcliffe came to Japan on the JET programme. After working as a translator, she pivoted her career through a coding bootcamp. Now she's a frontend developer at Kraken, where she works on their consumer-facing portal.
Read her story...Jesse Katsumata shares his journey working on AniLive, AnotherBall's VTuber streaming service, and how employees can feel comfortable being their true selves at work.
Read his story...Ryan Ginstrom describes his unexpected career turn towards being an engineering manager, and the unique freedoms he's found at Mercari.
Read his story...Lukas Schmid, Lead Senior Machine Learning Engineer, describes his unusual route to Japan and why he's happy to be at beBit.
Read his story...James Balcombe, Software Engineer at MODE, shares how he went from teaching computer science in Japan to working on the backend of an IoT company.
Read his story...Tyler is a software engineer at Treasure Data working on their Data Clean Room product. He talks about how Treasure Data supports their team’s learning and growth, and how they invest in the quality and performance of their services.
Read his story...Igor talks about joining NABLA Mobility, the variety of work that goes into predicting weather patterns, and how their software is helping pilots fly more efficient, less turbulent routes.
Read his story...Patrick Tyler started his career as a software engineer in Europe, before taking a sabbatical to explore Japan and teach English. Seven years later he’s still here, and now works as a backend software developer at SpeakBUDDY.
Read his story...After graduating from university, Richard came to Japan and found a job as a software developer. Eventually he joined Degica, where he rose to the role of CTO.
Read his story...Kazunori initially joined Degica as a web application engineer, but by identifying problems he wanted to fix, his role shifted first to VP of Infrastructure, and then VP of Payment Products.
Read his story...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 his 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 his 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 his story...Jeremy Marin was the first full time developer to join Crowd Cast. Five years later, the development team has grown to thirteen, with him becoming the engineering manager.
Read his story...Jeremy Marin is the engineering manager at Crowd Cast. He explains the challenges and benefits of hiring junior developers, particularly ones who have graduated from developer bootcamps.
Read his story...As an iOS developer at ZOZO, Inc., Michael has worked on products like a 3D body measurement suit and a 3D foot scanning mat. These products are like nothing that have come before them, so building them requires innovation both from a technical and UX perspective.
Read him story...Laura tells her story of coming to Japan and joining TenTen as a developer. She talks about some of the technical challenges she faced, and how the company takes a collaborative approach to development.
Read her story...As a developer, Torkel liked making improvements to processes for things like documentation and meetings. So when he was asked to become a product owner, he seized the opportunity to improve how WOVN develops software.
Read his story...Kseniya, a backend developer, was attracted to WOVN because it was a place where she could be herself, and wouldn’t be judged by her coloured hair, piercing, or tattoos. She found that flexibility extended to how they work, and people strived to create an emotionally supportive workplace too.
Read her story...Jerome joined WOVN as a backend engineer. Keeping things performant was a big technical challenge, as they have hundreds of requests per second and billions of records in their database. To top it off, for a time it was just him and one other developer responsible for the backend.
Read his story...David Robertson talks about how he taught himself programming to pivot his career from teaching to programming, and what it's like to work as a Backend Developer at WealthPark.
Read his story...Samuel Johnson shares his experiences of working at Autify, where he does a mix of SRE and backend engineering. He explains how their product and working environment make it an attractive opportunity.
Read his story...Jieqiong shares her experience of joining Mercari and working as a tech lead. She explains their engineering culture and provides tips for potential applicants.
Read her story...