About Us

Mercari is a Japan-based C2C marketplace company founded in 2013 with the mission to “Create value in a global marketplace where anyone can buy & sell.” From being the first tech unicorn from Japan before its IPO in 2018 we have come a long way towards becoming a global player and continuously and diligently work towards our transformation journey with a strong focus on our mission.

Since its inception, Mercari Group has worked to grow its services, investing in both our people and technology. Over time Mercari has expanded from being the top player in the C2C marketplace in Japan to new geographies like the U.S. We have also successfully launched new businesses such as Merpay, which is a mobile payment service platform with a vision to create a society where anyone can realize their dreams through a new ecosystem centered not only on payment service but also on credit. Today, Mercari Group is made up of multiple subsidiary businesses including logistics, B2C platform, blockchain, and sports team management.

For our services to be utilized by people worldwide; however, there is still a mountain of work ahead of us. This endeavor naturally requires the capability of the best talent and minds, and that is exactly the reason for us to launch the India Center of Excellence. With your help, we will continue to take on the world stage and strive to grow into a successful global tech company.

Our Culture

To achieve our mission at Mercari, our organization and each of our employees share the same values and perspectives. Our individual guidelines for action are defined by our Four values: Go Bold, All for One, and Be a Pro and Move fast. Our organization is also shaped by our four foundations: Sustainability, Diversity & Inclusion, Trust & Openness, and Well-being for Performance. Regardless of how big Mercari gets, the culture will remain essential to achieving our mission and something we want to preserve throughout our organization. We invite you to read the “Mercari Culture Doc,” which summarizes the behaviors and mindset shared by Mercari and its employees. We continue to build an environment where all of our members of diverse backgrounds are accepted and recognized, and where they can thrive while holding dear to Mercari’s culture.

Role Background

As Mercari’s user base continues to scale (serving ~21 million mau) and new product lines are introduced, building highly resilient, extensible, and cost-efficient backend systems is critical to the businesses' success.

The Backend Architecture / Staff Engineering function plays a pivotal role in shaping Mercari’s marketplace and product platforms. This role sits at the intersection of architecture, product impact, and technical leadership, enabling multiple teams to build faster, safer, and at scale.

As a Staff Engineer / Solution Architect, you will:

Help build critical systems: Design and evolve high-scale distributed product services (Advantage: Golang, GCP, ES) with reliability, cost, and latency SLAs. Unblock teams with complex design problems, and make 2–4 teams materially faster & ship with higher quality/speed
Raise the bar: Set engineering standards through architecture reviews, coding patterns/ reviews, and technical decision ownership, where needed
Multiply Talent at Mercari: Help form a healthy organization structure, define guidelines on service development, testing, deploy and monitoring to the whole engineering organization, includes Mentor senior engineers, set and accelerate forums for learning among senior engineers
AI-led delivery: Lead PoCs and production use of AI tools (coding agents, test gen, refactoring, observability) to 2× delivery & innovation.

Requirements

Must-have

A related technical degree required
Strong command of multiple programming languages and middleware
At least 8+ years of experience in a variety of hands-on software/technology roles, preferably in Consumer Internet Products & Solutions in the cloud.
Deep experience building and running distributed systems in cloud-native environments (GCP, Kubernetes).
Proven projects & results in building of large product surfaces — not just services, but customer-visible outcomes.
Strong system design, data modeling, and production debugging skills. Experience in building systems with 99.95 uptime
Ability to influence architecture across multiple teams without formal authority.
Exceptional written and verbal communication in pursuit of driving the mission forward.
Influencing skills in balancing short and long-term objectives including technical and business outcomes.

Good-to-have

Experience with search, personalization, or data platforms (e.g., Elasticsearch, event streams, ML pipelines).
Fluency with React-based frontends and forward-looking API design patterns.
Prior work in high-scale consumer platforms (in terms of qps/traffic & complexity).
Experience driving platformization or tech simplification.
Ability to build an environment for clear and open discussion of all issues You involve the right people, from your team and others, to resolve critical issues

Can-learn

Company-specific domains (commerce, growth, logistics, subscriptions).
New AI-native engineering workflows and tools.
Internal product and data platforms

Benefits

Working Conditions

Employment Status: Full-time

Office: Bangalore

Hybrid workstyle

We believe in high performance and professionalism. We work from office for 2 days/week and work from home 3 days/week.
To build a strong & highly-engaged organization in India, we highly encourage everyone to work from our Bangalore office, especially during the initial onboarding phase
We will continue to review and update the policy to address future organizational needs

Work Hours

Full flextime
*Flexible to choose working hours other than team common meetings

Staff Engineer (Backend)

AI overview