Jobs at SmartNews

Drive advertising product evolution through exploratory analysis, experimentation, causal inference, statistical modeling, and analytical data pipeline development. Partner with product, engineering, and business teams across Japan and the US to identify growth opportunities, evaluate user and revenue impacts, build metrics and self-service dashboards, and deliver strategic recommendations for ad product roadmaps and commercial execution.

Own the full sales cycle for new advertisers, including outbound prospecting, relationship development, discovery, pitching, negotiation, closing, onboarding, pipeline management, forecasting, and revenue target achievement. Build relationships with brands, agencies, and marketing decision-makers while translating client objectives into effective digital advertising solutions. Collaborate with Sales, Ad Operations, and Product teams to support campaign success, retention, and revenue growth.

Lead the infrastructure engineering team responsible for SmartNews’s global compute and network backbone. Translate infrastructure strategy into roadmaps, improve platform reliability and performance, mentor engineers, optimize team processes, and collaborate cross-functionally. The role involves maintaining high technical standards for large-scale infrastructure and developer experience, with preferred experience operating Kubernetes clusters of 1,000+ nodes and managing internal developer platforms.

Build and scale high-performance backend systems for SmartNews’s advertising platform. Responsibilities include architectural design, ad ranking and delivery, premium ads, targeting, custom audiences, measurement, and resilient online and offline services. Collaborate with machine learning, data platform, ads foundation, and AI infrastructure teams. The role requires developing high-traffic web services, optimizing low-latency systems, contributing to microservice architectures, and partnering with product stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle.

Design, build, deploy, operate, and monitor web services and backends serving millions of users. Use TypeScript, Next.js/React, Knative/Kubernetes, and AI coding tools while creating automated harnesses for correctness, performance, security, and maintainability. Propose user experiences and internal productivity tools, lead architectural decisions, and collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineering teams from concept through release and on-call operations.

Manage and grow programmatic advertising revenue in Japan by optimizing yield across SSPs/DSPs, running PMPs and preferred deals, configuring GAM, analyzing eCPMs/fill rates, troubleshooting ad delivery, and maintaining technical and commercial partner relationships.

Own the full sales cycle for net-new advertisers: prospect, qualify, pitch, negotiate, close, and onboard clients. Build agency and brand relationships, achieve revenue targets, optimize campaigns, maintain pipeline, and provide forecasting and reporting.

Lead end-to-end product design and AI-first prototyping for SmartNews Japan. Build functional, code-based prototypes using AI coding tools, iterate on core UX (feed, discovery, article browsing, ads integration), collaborate with PMs and engineers, and translate research and data into measurable design improvements tailored for Japanese mobile users.