Staff Engineer - Cross Border, Mercari India

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.

Established in Bengaluru in 2022, Mercari India serves as a crucial technology hub for the Mercari Group. Leveraging the rich and diverse tech talent in India, we primarily collaborate closely with our development hub in Japan to drive engineering development for Mercari's applications. Having grown to an organization of approximately 100+ members over about four years since its inception, Mercari India aims to evolve into an even stronger engineering organization that spearheads technological innovation for the entire group. This will be achieved by further enhancing our engineering capabilities and promoting AI initiatives that reflect India's cutting-edge technology and knowledge.

Mercari has operated localised marketplaces in Japan and the United States for years. The XB (Cross Border) team recently launched a new global app, already live in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States, with the ambition to expand into over 100 countries in the coming years. Behind that expansion is one engineering goal: build a global app platform that lets existing and future product services run consistently across every region, without the fragmentation that comes from excessive localisation.

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
• Be a Pro
• Move Fast

Our organization is also shaped by our four foundations:

• Sustainability
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Trust & Openness
• 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.

Work Responsibilities

• Shape technical direction for XB (cross-border) backend systems that let buyers in the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Europe buy from Japanese sellers on Mercari and Mercari Shops.
• Lead cross-team design across the cross-border buying journey: discovery and search, item detail, pricing and landed cost, checkout and payments, and post-purchase. Set clear service boundaries and API contracts, including BFF patterns for iOS, Android and Web.
• Design and build maintainable Go services, staying hands-on in the hardest parts. Use coding agents and AI-assisted review to raise both speed and quality, and set the pattern others follow.
• Build for multi-region from day one, so one global app platform serves every market consistently, without fragmenting per country.
• Own reliability for systems that span JP marketplace services, partner APIs, payments and third-party providers. Set the standards for safe rollout, observability and incident learning, increasingly using AI-assisted automation to cut toil.
• Make 2 to 4 teams materially faster by unblocking complex design problems and simplifying the platform, increasingly by applying AI across the whole development workflow.
• Partner with PdMs and engineers in India and Japan to turn ambiguous, cross-functional problems into plans teams can execute.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leaders, including how they work alongside AI agents in day-to-day delivery.
  

Bold Challenges

XB is turning Japan's marketplace into a global one. Every purchase crosses languages, currencies, regulations and logistics, and depends on systems owned by many teams in Japan. This role is for someone who can reason across that whole chain, make deliberate trade-offs between speed and correctness, and give teams a technical direction they can ship against while new markets keep launching.

You will thrive here if you Go Bold by challenging architectural constraints with evidence, practise All for One by building alignment across India and Japan rather than optimizing for one team, and Be a Pro by taking responsibility for the quality and operability of your decisions. The challenge is to build technical direction that other engineers can act on while remaining close enough to implementation to test assumptions and learn from production.

AI-native approach: you will be at the frontline of how XB engineering changes as engineers and autonomous agents share the work. That means helping define how we design, review, ship and operate software with AI, and the standards that keep quality and reliability high as velocity goes up.

• 10 to 12 years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated leadership of complex backend initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Deep experience building and running distributed systems in cloud-native environments (GCP, Kubernetes).
• Strong backend skills in Go (or proven ability to be productive in Go quickly), including API design and testing.
• Proven delivery of large, customer-visible product surfaces, not only internal services.
• Strong system design, data modeling and production debugging, with experience running systems at 99.95% availability.
• Ability to influence architecture across multiple teams without formal authority.
• Hands-on experience applying AI/LLMs to improve engineering productivity, such as coding agents, AI-assisted review, testing or debugging.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining architecture decisions and risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Cross-border e-commerce, payments, multi-currency or multi-region systems.
• Search, personalization or data platforms (e.g., Elasticsearch, event streams, ML pipelines).
• BFF API design and familiarity with React or mobile clients.
• Integrating with third-party partners or external APIs at scale.
• Driving platformization or tech simplification.
• Experience developing AI agents, or building AI-powered developer tooling for other engineers.

• Mercari's JP marketplace domain and internal platforms.
• Cross-border specifics like duties, tax, logistics and region rules.

Working Conditions

• Employment Status: Full-time
• Office: Bangalore
• Hybrid workstyle
• We believe in high performance and professionalism. We work from the 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 office setup phase
• We will continue to review and update the policy to address future organizational needs

Media

• Mercari Engineering Portal
• Mercari Engineering Blog: Backend
• Mercan, introduces the people that make Mercari
• https://about.in.mercari.com/category/news/
• https://about.in.mercari.com/life/

• Building one global app platform (XB tech blog)

• Mercari Careers
• Culture Doc, the internal document that summarizes the behaviors and mindset shared by Mercari and its members