About SmartNews

SmartNews is a global leader in redefining information and news discovery, committed to providing users with accurate, timely information and supporting quality journalism. We combine the power of our unique machine-learning technology with the expertise of our first-rate editorial team to bring news that matters to millions of users from our over 3,000 global publishing partners.

Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan, SmartNews has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore.

The Team

The Infrastructure Services Team is at the heart of SmartNews, building systems that will power the next 5 years of SmartNews backend. They focus on building and maintaining reliable product platforms that can handle heavy traffic while ensuring uptime of 99.99% or higher.

Beyond just keeping the lights on, they are passionate about improving efficiency and performance across all engineering teams.

The Role

As a Backend Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring high scalability and reliability, aiming for 99.99% uptime or above. Be a key architect in crafting systems that will power the backend infrastructure for the next five years. Your expertise will contribute to the foundation that supports SmartNews' ambitious growth goals.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering teams to maintain high-quality standards in a fast-paced, iterative environment
• Advocate for product quality, security, and performance improvements
• Craft code that meets internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices in a high-scale web environment
• Ship large features and improvements independently, with minimal guidance
• Partner effectively across dependent teams to deliver against commitments
• Experience in diagnosing and preventing performance and optimization problems at scale
• Help to define and improve internal standards for code style and best practices
• Drive initiatives to enhance reliability, efficiency, and performance of engineering systems, driving SmartNews forward in news delivery technology

Requirements

Minimum requirements

• 3+ years of backend software development experience
• BS degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering
• Experience designing, building, testing, launching and running software products
• Skilled in Java/Kotlin programming languages
• Experienced in CICD practices
• Experience with microservices architecture using technologies like Docker and Kubernetes
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent such problems
• Business-level English

Nice to have experiences/skills

• Fast-growing company experience of architecture design for a high-traffic distributed backend system
• Knowledge of and experience using AWS cloud resources
• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools
• Experience and skills in Spring Boot, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Hive, Docker, Kubernetes (k8s), and more.

Benefits

Benefits available at the SmartNews Tokyo Office

• Lunch and snacks prepared daily in our on-site kitchen facility
• In-office coffee stand offering single-origin coffees, espresso-based beverages, teas, and other seasonal drinks
• SmartSelect, our support program for employee self-development, well-being, and productivity
• All healthcare and social insurance required by the Japanese labor law

Visa Sponsorship and Relocation Support

• Work visa sponsorship is available for candidates who meet eligibility requirements
• To support a smooth transition for candidates who are moving to Japan from overseas, SmartNews partners with a travel service provider