Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Core Services)

About SmartNews 

SmartNews is a leading global information and news discovery company dedicated to delivering quality information to the people who need it. Thanks to our unique machine-learning technology and relationships with more than 3,000 global publisher partners, we provide news that matters to millions of users.

Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, SmartNews also has offices in Palo Alto, New York, Beijing, and Singapore.

If you share our vision and are passionate about our mission, we encourage you to apply!

The Team

The Core Systems Team is responsible for building and maintaining highly scalable and reliable platforms that support our global operations. Our mission is to ensure 99.99% uptime or more, providing the stability and performance required for SmartNews to deliver a seamless experience to millions of users. Beyond maintaining infrastructure, we drive efficiency, reliability, and performance initiatives across engineering teams, ensuring that our systems evolve to meet the demands of the future.

Your Role and Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with Engineering Teams & develop software with a high bar ensuring quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance
• Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale environment.
• Confidently ship large-size features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the internal and external teams on larger projects
• Partner effectively across dependent teams to deliver against commitments
• Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review
• Drive initiatives to enhance the reliability, efficiency, and performance of our engineering systems. Your contributions will be instrumental in propelling SmartNews to the forefront of 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 CI/CD practices
• Experience with microservice architecture using technologies like Containers 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

• 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, and Kubernetes (k8s)

Working condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

Click here or visit our careers site for more info.

Benefits

• All healthcare and social insurance required by the Japanese labor law, plus annual health check
• Visa sponsorship and overseas relocation support available for eligible candidates

Click here or visit our careers site for more info about our benefits.