Software/Senior Software Engineer, Ads Backend

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 SmartNews Ads Division has many teams, together we build systems that find the best interests among the four parties: our users, advertisers, publishers and SmartNews. 

• The Ads Product Backend Team is responsible for making our ads products more profitable and sustainable by means of ads targeting, ranking, auction and measurement in a high traffic ads delivery system with 10M+ users. They work on proactive, innovative, and creative problem solving for system improvements which will result in profitable ads-ecosystem and generation of relevant Ads system. As part of the team, you will:
• Participate in the iteration of architecture design of robust and scalable online/offline backend systems for state-of-the-art ads delivery system, including 
• Ranking Backend: better ads prediction and delivery
• Premium Ads: offer guaranteed visibility, better positioning ads
• Targeting & CustomAudience: great matching between users and ads
• Measurement: measuring ads performance stats across web and app scenarios
• Work closely with teams like Ads Ranking(Machine Learning team), Ads Foundation and other Ads/DP/AiInfra teams to deliver high quality ads
• The Ads Manager Team is particularly focusing on making the advertising experience better, so that users, advertisers, agencies, and employees who can create and handle advertising. Their mission is to deliver an excellent UX through a reliable, high-performance Ads Manager UI by combining robust domain modeling, scalable system design, and backend excellence to support a clean, intuitive interface. By improving UX facing customers, they drive business impact and create lasting competitive advantage. In this team, you will:
• Build a high scalability and high availability system for our advertisers directly
• Build the industry-standardized next-generation Ads management system
• Question the current solution, propose improvements then release them with the team
• Work closely with teams like Ads Delivery, Ads Ranking, Ads Reporting and other vertical Ads product teams, and you care about the developer experience so much because those team members are your users as well

Team selection will be made at the end of the interview process.

Minimum requirements

• 3+ years experience in developing backend systems for high traffic web services
• Advanced skill and experience in at least one programming language (preferably Java, Kotlin, Golang; open to C++, C#, Python)
• Fluent in using Kafka, Redis, SQL and some NoSQL DBs
• Experienced in using code architecture (e.g. clean architecture, MVVM, hexagonal)
• Experienced in unit test and integration test design and implementation
• Experienced in high-ability Web service architecture design
• Experienced in CI/CD
• Experienced in container technology such as Docker and Kubernetes 
• Can understand the domain-driven design
• Business level English
• BS degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Science (physics or mathematics) or other relevant majors

Nice to have experiences/skills

• High programming skills in Java, for example, failure analysis and class/interface design
• Experience of architecture design in a high traffic web service
• Configuration, development and operation of a Microservice / Service Mesh architecture
• Experience in Github, AWS, SpringBoot, MySQL, Hive, Spark, Flink, Docker, Kubernetes
• Experience in large scale data processing techniques
• Have basic understandings of machine learning, statistics, and various mathematics at a liberal arts level
• Experience in leading a whole lifecycle of a project; clarification of the motivation and the goal, definition of the system design, develop and release it, and learning from the result
• Leadership experience (such as technical lead or management role) in a fast growing company
• Skill and will to partner with internal business people to define product strategy and features; for example, ads product managers or ads product specialists
• Experience in advertisement / AdTech industry
• Frontend development
• Experience migrating on-prem system onto cloud
• Business level Japanese

Working condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

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