Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Content Platform)

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 Osaka (Kansai Office), Palo Alto, New York and Singapore.

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

Content Platform Team is a team of experienced backend engineers responsible for the core structure of SmartNews’ content pipeline, integration with respectable partners/publishers, processing data received to make them available for Machine Learning and ranking pipeline, and also ensuring that our company delivers quality information by building sophisticated moderation systems.

We handle and process hundreds of millions of contents per months, not only with text-based articles but also multimedia like videos, images, audio and user-generated-contents, ensuring that the latest, relevant, high quality information is available to users in a few minutes as soon as the pipeline discovers it.

Our team is a small team with high-agility providing chances to work with multiple stacks, best recommended practices, up-to-date industry standard and highly encourages experimentation/engineering driven initiatives.

Being able to work closely with teams across departments, such as advertising, media, business/product manager, machine learning, etc to ensure that the features we are delivering stays relevant to the market needs with real-world impact is one of our biggest excitements.

Together with our Company’s Core Value, the team also emphasizes strong, end-to-end ownership and accountability. Each initiative is grounded in data, aligned with business goals, and contributes to strengthening both vertical and horizontal initiatives.

In this role, you will translate business goals and product strategies into impactful engineering solutions at scale. You will design, implement, test, deploy the solutions that you proposed and finally monitor the great impact that you have created.

You will directly collaborate closely with Product, Business, and cross-functional engineering teams to identify opportunities, define success metrics, and deliver measurable improvements through data-driven solutions. Be ready to face challenges that require you to enter new domains, think out-of-the-box and provide solutions that never exist before.

How your day-to-day looks:

• Translate business objectives and product requirements into scalable engineering solutions.
• Your work will be mainly on the backend side (mainly Java, Kotlin, scripting languages), although it’s not uncommon to also work on the web-based frontend parts of internal admin tools (React).
• Lead end-to-end solution proposals starting from defining/understanding problems, design systems, implementation, testing, deployments, monitoring, maintenance, and documentation to ensure sustainable development phases. Also on how to effectively use AI to empower and bring an even higher quality of results.
• Partner closely with people from various responsibilities, backgrounds (non-engineering included) to achieve the company’s mission.
• Be proud of working with the team that handles one of the highest traffic in the organization.
• Lastly, don’t forget to have fun as well as bringing impacts to society!

Minimum requirements

• Strong foundation in high scale architectures with high output efficiency

• Java/Kotlin (having no difficulties picking up new frameworks), scripting, and some common frontend stacks (e.g React)
• Capability for navigating complex, large-scale codebase.
• Solid coding skills with attention to code quality, readability, maintainability. Strong problem-solving skills (not limited to engineering)
• Solid background in IaaS, Cloud infrastructure/services, SaaS
• Team player, able to coach/be-coached, follow recommended practices, adopt the value of Nothing is Somebody Else’s problem.
• Business-level proficiency in English with the ability to collaborate effectively with local Product and Business stakeholders.

Nice to have experiences/skills

• Japanese proficiency skills
• Familiarity with ML-related fields, basic understanding of Android/iOS development
• Had experience of building your own application as a product owner (understand how product manager thinks)
• Understanding of user behavior analysis, growth metrics, and business-driven optimization.
• Contributions to open-source projects

Related Links

• Click here or visit our careers site to check employee interviews

Working condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

Click here or visit our careers site for more info.

Benefits available at the SmartNews Tokyo Office

• 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.