(Senior) Software Engineer, Backend

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, and Singapore.

The Team

Own, build, and maintain our content provider-facing platforms, enabling SmartNews to continue providing top content from leading news publishers, retail brands, and more. Our relationships with our content providers are key to our success, and we are dedicated to delivering a top-quality experience throughout their journey with us—from content ingestion to analytics, reporting, and payments.

The Mission

In this role, your mission will be to act as the bridge between our many content partners and our products. You will lead design and implementation of key platforms providing smooth content ingestion, management and resilient data pipelines to measure content performance and support revenue share as part of our Media Prosper Program. Your primary focus will be on developing features and building the backend infrastructure for our content provider platforms. However, you will also contribute to frontend development for external partner-facing websites and contribute across the entire news pipeline from ingestion to delivery as opportunities arise, ensuring we can deliver great contents to our users at every stage of the product.

Role and Responsibilities:

• Own the development and maintenance of a key partner platform in our premium content domain
• Design, build, test, deploy, maintain, and improve backend systems that support content ingestion and management at scale
• Flexibly develop across backend and web frontend as needed to enhance and improve platform functionality.
• Participate in system design, code reviews, and on-call rotation to maintain high-quality standards for code and ensure the reliability of mission-critical systems.
• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to prioritize, plan, and successfully deliver new products to our customers.

Requirements

Minimum requirements

• 3+ years of backend software development experience; 1+ year in web frontend or full-stack development.
• Proficient in Java/Kotlin programming languages.
• Hands-on experience in designing, building, testing, and maintaining large-scale backend systems, with expertise in CI/CD practices and microservices architecture using Docker/Kubernetes.
• Exceptional communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Business level communication in English

Nice to have experiences/skills

• 1 year or more in a tech lead role
• Knowledge of and experience using AWS cloud resources
• Business level communication in Japanese

Working condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

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Benefits

• Annual health check covered by the company 
• Visa sponsorship and overseas relocation support available for eligible candidates

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