Senior Cloud Network Engineer (Platform Engineering)

Introduction

About Us

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.

Our Culture

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 three values: Go Bold, All for One, and Be a Pro. Our organization is also shaped by our four foundations: Sustainability, Diversity & Inclusion, Trust & Openness, and 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.

Team

The Platform Engineering teams are responsible for helping engineers at Mercari and its subsidiaries to build and deliver better products to our customers. We provide infrastructure and DevOps toolchains to increase the reliability, security and observability of the service to make the work of engineers easy.

Within the platform group, there are multiple sub-teams that deal with specific layers and this position is for a senior platform engineer in the Cloud Network team which takes care of end-to-end network infrastructure from the edge (CDN) to the cloud & Kubernetes network layer(including servicemesh).

You can see more details about the team structure on our tech blog How we reorganize the platform team.

Recent or ongoing projects

The following are some of the recent or in-progress projects handled by the Network team.

• How Istio solved our problems
• Managing Network Policies for namespaces isolation on a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster
• Dynamic Service Routing using Istio
  

Role

We are looking for a senior software engineer for our Network team who will play a crucial role in ensuring the seamless integration of cloud network solutions and cutting-edge cloud-native technologies. Our ideal candidate is a highly motivated individual, driven by a passion for enhancing developer productivity and committed to elevating the reliability, security, and observability of Mercari services. Also, the ability to release, migrate and opera

Work responsibilities

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain platform features and toolings that support the entire software development cycle from build, test to deployment and operation
• Support migration and adoption of new platform features and toolings
• Improve platform stability, scalability, availability and security with the SRE and Security teams
• Improve observability of services and the platform itself to reduce the incidents and control the overall cost
• Improve and automate daily platform operations and reduce toils
• Be an advocate of engineering best practices and communicate with internal developers to understand their needs

You may be fit if you

• Are passionate about improving developer productivity and experience
• Are passionate about building, operating and maintaining scalable infrastructures with operations automation
• Are neutral on the technology itself and can take pragmatic approaches to the issues
• Avoid reinventing the wheel and utilize the existing tooling and ecosystem as much as possible
• Have good communication and interpersonal skills

Bold Challenges

Since the platform and its toolings are used not only by Japan marketplace but also by Japan fintech and Mercari US marketplace, the changes and improvements can affect the whole organization’s performance from development agility to system reliability. As a software engineer of the team, your implementation can have a truly significant impact.

The team needs to understand what the developers are struggling with and what is required for the Mercari Group’s product development. With this empathy and collection of requirements, the team prioritizes the problems to solve and decides the solution for them. You can join this decision-making process and propose a pragmatic solution leveraging your knowledge and experience.

Minimum Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in development, operating and maintaining complex and scalable production systems
• Experience in end-to-end infrastructure management, automation and system architecture design
• Experience in writing design docs or proposals and reaching agreements with stakeholders
• Experience in using container management platforms (ex: Kubernetes, Docker) in production
• Experience in operating and being the admin of cloud (GCP, AWS or Azure) in production

• Strong experience in implementing and managing infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions like Terraform

• Good understanding of common software development lifecycle (SDLC)
• Good understanding of Linux networking and troubleshooting

• Experience working with network proxies such as Envoy/HAProxy/Nginx
• Strong understanding of networking, especially OSI Layer 4 to 7: load balancers, proxies, API gateways, DNS, TLS, and HTTP protocol
• Working knowledge of cloud and Kubernetes networking layer
• Hands-on experience in developing tools/automation using go-lang, python or any other scripting language

Preferred Requirements

• Experience in a distributed system or microservices architecture
• Understanding of Service level agreements and objectives
• Experience making technical decisions as a tech lead
• Familiar with monitoring/observability technologies like Prometheus, Graphite, Grafana, Kibana, Elasticsearch
• Open-source software development experience and or participation in open-source communities
• Working knowledge of cloud security and application security

• Experience in using any service meshes in production such as Istio or Linkerd
• Experience in using network reliability practices such as circuit breaking, rate limiting
• Experience in designing secure cloud-based network architectures
• Experience in managing/operating CDN

Work Conditions

Employment Status

Full-time

Office

Bangalore

• Hybrid workstyle
  • We believe in high performance and professionalism. We work from office for 3 days/week and work from home 2 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

Work Hours

• Full flextime (no core time)
  *Flexible to choose working hours other than team common meetings

Media

Owned Media

• Mercari Engineering Portal
• Mercan - Introduces the people that make Mercari
• Mercari US Blog

Related Articles

• Development Platforms and Platformers: On Rising to the Global Standard Ken Wakasa, Mercari CTO | mercan
• Developer Experience at Mercari
• Introducing Platform Infra Team at Mercari
• Introduction of the Network team
• Introducing Platform Infra Team at Mercari
• Blogs related to Infrastructure

Last updated on Dec 2, 2022