• Employment Status: Full-time
• Work Hours: Full Flextime (no core time)
• Office: Roppongi

For more details, see the Overview of Our Positions section on our Careers site.

About Mercari
Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people

"What can I do to help society thrive with the finite resources we have?" The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them. Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential. For more information about Mercari Group's mission, see Mercari's Culture Doc

Organization/Team Mission
Mercari Engineering Principles

Mercari Engineering Principles are a shared understanding that serves as the foundation of engineering beliefs and behavior at Mercari. The Engineering Principles are designed to complement the organizational identity (Mercari's mission, values, and culture) from an engineering viewpoint.

These principles ultimately help us achieve Mercari's mission by defining the ideal state we seek to realize in the long term.

• Passion For The Product
• Grow Together
• Solve Through Mechanisms
• Collaborate Openly

For More Details, Please See The Following Link

• Engineering Culture

The Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) team is responsible for building and maintaining reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient database infrastructure that enables Mercari's core business operations. We empower engineering teams by providing stable access to critical data through TiDB Cloud, ensuring high availability and performance for the platform that millions of users depend on daily. Our mission includes operating CoreDB (the central database for items, transactions, users, and other critical business data), managing database migrations and consolidations, and driving continuous cost and performance optimization across all database workloads.

Mercari is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the DBRE team. In this role, you will be responsible for the team's organizational health, technical strategy, and execution. You will guide the team through critical migrations, mentor engineers, and collaborate with cross-functional partners to ensure our database infrastructure meets the evolving needs of the business.

See here for more information about our mission and values.

Work Responsibilities
Specific work responsibilities are listed below:

• Team Leadership & Management: Manage, mentor, and hire a diverse team of Database Reliability Engineers; foster a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
• Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Define and drive the technical vision for Mercari's database infrastructure.
• Reliability & Operations: oversee the stability of mission-critical database systems; lead incident response for high-severity database issues and drive post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Cost Optimization: Partner with FinOps to drive continuous cost optimization initiatives, such as shard consolidation and resource right-sizing, balancing performance with efficiency.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with Platform Infrastructure, SRE, Observability, and Product teams to align database capabilities with business requirements and critical user journeys.

Unique Challenges

• Stabilize Cloud-Native Transformation: We are in the final stages of a massive migration from our legacy on-premise data center (TC2) to TiDB Cloud. You will lead the team in completing this critical transition and defining the future cloud-native operational model.
• Scale & Complexity: We operate large-scale MySQL and TiDB clusters handling hundreds of thousands of QPS and tens of terabytes of data. You will face unique challenges in ensuring 99.99% availability while managing complex distributed systems.
• Cost vs. Reliability Balance: As we scale, database costs become a significant factor. You will lead initiatives to optimize costs (e.g., through archiving strategies and architecture changes) without compromising the reliability of our "Core" systems.

Qualifications

• Required Experience/Skills

• Individuals who can resonate with the mission and values of the Mercari Group and each company

• Experience managing or leading an engineering team (SRE, DBRE, or Infrastructure focus preferred), including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Strong technical background in database technologies (e.g., MySQL, TiDB, PostgreSQL) and understanding of database internal architecture, performance tuning, and high availability designs.
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Ansible).
• Proven track record of managing incidents and driving post-mortem/root cause analysis processes.

• Excellent communication skills to effectively collaborate with stakeholders and explain complex technical risks to non-technical leadership.

• Preferred Experience/Skills

• Experience operating large-scale distributed databases (e.g., TiDB, Spanner, Vitess) in production.

• Experience with FinOps or cloud cost management strategies.
• Background in software development (Go, Python, etc.) to understand the developer experience and tooling needs.
• Experience leading major infrastructure migrations (e.g., on-prem to cloud, database engine changes).

• Knowledge of modern SRE practices, including SLO/SLI definition and error budget management.

• Language

• Japanese: Independent (CEFR - B2)

• English: Independent (CEFR - B2) Preferred

For details about CEFR, see here.

Learn More About Mercari Group

• Careers site:
• Mercan:
• Social media: X / Linkedin
• Introduction of CoreSRE
• How to deal with legacy systems
• An example of DDL application to a special MySQL configuration

Recruiting at Mercari
At Mercari Group, we value empathizing with and embodying the mission and values of the Group and each company. To promote the creation of an organization that maximizes the total amount of value exhibited by all members, we would like to understand the experience and skills of each candidate as accurately as possible.

Recruiting cycle at Mercari Group

• Application screening
• Skill assessment: For engineering positions, you will be asked to complete a skill assessment on HackerRank or GitHub. For non-engineering positions, you may be asked to complete an assessment depending on the position. (The timing of the assessment may coincide with the interview process.)
• Interview: The number of interviews may vary depending on the position.
• Reference check: We will ask for online references around the timing of the final interview.
• Offer: Offers will be determined carefully in consideration of the final interview and the reference check.

Learn more about our recruiting process here.

Equal Opportunity Hiring
Here at Mercari, we work to realize a world in which no one's potential is limited by their background and everyone has the opportunity to freely create value. We also firmly believe that a mindset of Inclusion & Diversity is essential for us to achieve our mission.

This, of course, extends to our hiring practices as well. Mercari is committed to eliminating discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, physical disability, and other such factors so that anyone who shares our mission and values can join us, regardless of their background. For more details, please read our I&D statement.

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