KOMOJU

With around half of their total members (and around 75% of engineers) coming from outside Japan, KOMOJU generally uses English for written communication (e.g. Slack, Github). Verbal communication is also primarily in English.

However, quite a few people working there can speak both English and Japanese fluently so Japanese may be spoken at times during meetings, especially when they involve teams other than engineering.

Overall, the language spoken depends on the team. The dev team uses mostly English, but their HR team (for example) speaks primarily Japanese.

KOMOJU sponsors visas for candidates living outside of Japan. They’re still hiring from abroad, but due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19 new employees from abroad may need to start working on a contract basis. KOMOJU will switch you over to a full-time employee contract and sponsor your visa once it’s safe to come to Japan again.

KOMOJU also helps out with relocation (searching for apartments etc.) but they don’t have a formal policy for this. The support offered depends on each individual case. They do always pay for flight tickets to Japan in the case that someone moves from abroad however.

KOMOJU has a very generous vacation policy.

Like most companies in Japan, their basic PTO package starts with 10 days of normal paid time off during an employee’s first year, followed by increases in subsequent years in accordance with Japanese labor law.

KOMOJU also offers 5 extra vacation days that can be used during the summer months, and another 5 days of year-end holidays.

They also have birthday leave, which means members can get an extra day off each year on their birthday. So that’s a total of 21 vacation days per year in addition to Japanese public holidays. They also offer maternity and paternity leave.

💻 New tech gear

👩‍🎓 Skill development support

💛 Support for attending conferences

🧡 Seminar participation support

📕 Book purchases

👶 Parental Leave

👩‍🏫 Language Learning Support

💜 Social security / insurance benefits included

🏥 Healthcare insurance

💚 Pension insurance

🚃 Commuter allowance

👍 Motorized sitting / standing desks when working from our office

Engineering Jobs

KOMOJU’s interview process skips the high-pressure whiteboard interviews in favor of a coding challenge that’s closer to what engineers would actually work on day-to-day.

Here’s the basic interview flow:

• First interview: Meeting with two KOMOJU engineers to discuss about something you’ve built and see if you’re a good cultural fit
• Second interview: Technical challenge to test your real-world development skills
• Third interview: Meeting with a senior leader in the company

KOMOJU allows full remote work from anywhere in the world! The only stipulation is that your work hours must have some overlap with the JST time zone.

Even once COVID-19 is no longer a concern, KOMOJU intends to continue their full remote policy.

And if you do relocate to Japan, there's no need to live near their Tokyo office — you can work from anywhere in Japan.

KOMOJU has an office in the Kichijoji area of Tokyo, but they’ve switched to working fully remotely due to COVID-19. A typical work day at KOMOJU begins at around 10:00AM for most people. Some teams begin with a stand-up meeting where they quickly share their tasks for the day before focusing on work for the rest of the day.

One unique aspect of KOMOJU’s work style is their code review process. Since they have a flat hierarchy and a relatively small team, they have a system where reviewers are selected randomly. Their engineers also take care of operations and handle errors or technical customer queries as a team via Slack.

A typical stopping time for engineers at KOMOJU is at around 7:00PM, and they have very little overtime so engineers normally won’t be online past this time. They also make it a point to avoid unnecessary meetings and prefer to have ad-hoc discussions with relevant members only.

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