Are you looking

• To make meaningful changes at the fastest-growing tech company in Japan?
• For a fair, highly flexible, inclusive working environment where anyone, regardless of their background, can make an impact?
• To build the next bold idea in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology?
• For a place where things are not just fast - but they happen now?

We Are Zeals - "Designing conversations. Driving conversions."

Zeals is not another chatbot. Our automated chat solution and conversational technology change how consumers purchase or act online. Zeals converts customers who appear "unengaged" into "valuable" through designed chat on Messaging Apps. Using AI-powered, human-designed conversation flows across chat platforms, Zeals enables brands to build personalized, automated conversations with their consumers and develop a deeper understanding of their preferences while creating a delightful, seamless shopping experience. Our last 3 years have been phenomenal. We have captured the heart of many businesses in Japan, with over 480 enterprises relying on our chat commerce offering to boost their mobile business.

The goal is simple: to "revolutionize hospitality on the Internet" by unlocking digital customer service experiences that were limited to physical stores previously.

Just Getting Started…

With more than 480 enterprise companies worldwide already utilizing our product, we are perfectly poised to seize market share and fuel exponential growth in the US market, with an eye on global expansion. Investors have taken note of our potential, leading us to recently secure nearly $40 million in funding, backed by Salesforce Ventures.

As a
Principal Backend Engineer
at Zeals, you won't just write code — you will
own systems end-to-end
,
shape our architectural strategy
, and i
nfluence technical direction across teams
. You will be a key technical leader in our backend domain, responsible for designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems that power mission-critical services and accelerate the impact of our conversational commerce platform. This role is not about following roadmaps — it's about creating them. You'll work across teams to raise the engineering bar, mentor senior engineers, and drive strategic decisions that shape our product and infrastructure for years to come.

What You'll Do

• Drive
  architecture and design
  of complex, distributed backend systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance
• Lead initiatives to modernize legacy systems and migrate to robust, decoupled services using
  Golang, gRPC, and REST
• Own high-stakes technical decisions, balancing trade-offs and setting standards for software design across teams
• Ensure best practices in clean code, DDD, testing, observability, and documentation are deeply embedded in the development lifecycle
• Collaborate with engineering leadership, product managers, and stakeholders to align backend capabilities with business priorities
• Foster a culture of technical excellence through
  mentorship, knowledge sharing,
  and
  collaborative problem solving
• When required, participate in the on-call rotation and act as a technical escalation point for critical incidents

What You'll Need

• Proficiency in development flow based on git and GitHub
• 8+ years of experience in Software Engineering or a similar role, with preferably experience in Golang
• Strong sense of testing, including unit tests and integration tests
• Ability to communicate recommendations for improvements on current systems, processes, and services as needed
• Exhibit a strong ability to adapt in a dynamic and ever-changing environment
• Ability to solve problems, especially to identify the source of the problem, and create and test solutions
• Proven team-leading experience with the ability to mentor and guide team members

What Makes You Stand Out

• Working knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and Clean Architecture
• Working knowledge of gRPC and RESTful API
• Working knowledge of RDB and SQL
• Experience in Google Cloud Platform
• Experience in Continuous Integration tools like CircleCI
• Experience in issue management systems like Jira
• Japanese communication skills
• Experience in development using Python, Ruby, NodeJS
• Experience in using tracing and metrics in deriving performance optimizations and troubleshooting

Don't just take our word for it

Zeals has received the LinkedIn Top Startups award twice in a row. We believe this is a testament to our growth and our ability to attract great talents–who could potentially be your colleague

Our Tech Stack

• Backend Languages: Go, Python, Elixir
• Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, , Recoil, Zod, Tanstack, etc)
• Mobile Languages: None
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, GCP Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
• Configuration management tool: Terraform
• CI/CD: Github Actions, ArgoCD, CircleCI
• Monitoring: Grafana, GCP Cloud Monitoring, GCP Logging, GCP Cloud Trace, Opsgenie
• Data: BigQuery, Parquet, Spark, Scala, Python, dbt
• Knowledge Tools: Confluence
• Other: GitHub / Slack / Jira
• Process: Scrum

Ready to roll up our sleeves

We're obsessed with bringing hospitality to everyone – whether it's our customers or you You're an individual with unique needs, and while we may not have ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars to offer, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers you'll be proud to brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out As an employer, we're ready to roll up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means making your experience better.

• Salary Range : competitive
• Performance review:
  twice a year
• Holidays:
  10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave days per year.
• Visa support:
  We sponsor visas for the right candidates.
• Flexible working:
  Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work from overseas
• Housing allowance
  (within 1.5KM away from office)
• Club activity allowance
• Team building allowance and Lunch allowance
• Zeals Bar
  (bi-monthly free-flow beer party)

**********

For applicants via our CEO Masa Shimizu's X account:

Please note that if we receive a high number of applications, we may limit the number of candidates selected for an interview with Masa Shimizu as part of the screening process. We appreciate your understanding and thank you for your interest.