Platform Infrastructure Engineer

About Cogent

Founded in 2014, Cogent Labs is devoted to providing innovative solutions to real-world problems in order to improve people’s quality of work and life through intelligent automation. 

We believe achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of customers' needs and practices in order to build products that can leverage the power of custom AI models through a carefully crafted UI and UX. Our main product is SmartRead, a generic and versatile solution for automating digital and analog document processing for a wide range of businesses.

Headquartered in Tokyo, we are a diverse company with international members from 20 different countries. We are looking for exceptional talent with deep domain expertise that are eager to work with our team on crafting and delivering unique value to our customers.

What we offer

• Competitive Salary - Based on skills and experience.
• Performance bonus eligibility twice a year.
• Work Hours - Standard work hours 9:00 -18:00 with flexible time system around core hours.
• Telework Policy - 6 days / month.
• Paid Holiday - Maximum 20 days per year (additional Congratulatory, Bereavement leaves available).
• Holiday - Sat & Sun, Japanese National Holidays, and Year-end and New Year holidays.

Benefits

• Visa Sponsorship.
• Support for language training.
• Free in-office breakfast, coffee, tea, drinks and snacks.
• Subsidized gym membership.
• Monthly commute expense.
• Japanese Social Security - all applicable (Health Insurance, Pension, employment insurance etc.).
• Maternity leave, childcare leave (including male employees).
• Yearly health checkup.

Job Summary

Cogent Labs is seeking an experienced and dynamic engineer to build, optimize, and maintain our Cloud and On-premises platforms which deliver our AI-powered products to customers

Responsibilities

Working in a team whose responsibilities include:

• Enhance our cloud and on-premises product platforms, ensuring exceptional levels of usability, scalability, maintainability, and security.
• Optimize performance and cost tradeoffs of kubernetes-based microservices and machine-learning pipelines to deliver greater overall system efficiency and responsiveness for customers.
• Implement robust logging, monitoring, and diagnostic tooling to allow timely resolution of customer issues and pre-release testing.
• Operate and improve disaster recovery procedures to protect customers' data and ensure business continuity.
• Triage and resolve production incidents, utilizing internal SLOs and error-budgets. 
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across application, database, network, infrastructure, ensuring seamless platform operation.
• Collaborate closely with developers and product owners to understand and resolve pain-points and improve overall Developer Experience (DevEx).
• Document specifications and architecture to facilitate knowledge sharing and streamline customer operations.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest advancements in cloud, on-premises, and DevOps technologies.

Required experience

• 4+ years of experience  in roles such as SRE, DevOps, Cloud Engineer, Platform Engineer, or Backend Engineer.
• Excellent problem-solving and diagnostic skills, with the ability to debug complex issues.
• Strong communication skills in order to understand the needs of fellow technical team members, as well as customers.
• Experience with, and interest in, at least some of the following:
  
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Terraform or other Infrastructure-as-code (IaC)
  • Kubernetes operation and cluster management.
  • Containerization with docker and/or containerd
  • Monitoring and alerting with prometheus/cortex or similar
  • Troubleshooting Linux issues (e.g. disk, networking, logs)
  • Software and infrastructure security practices
  • Application development in NodeJS, Python, or Golang

Nice-to-have experience

• Leadership in a team with similar responsibilities to those described above
• Deploying applications to remote on-premises / air-gapped environments
• Working with Enterprise customers or environments
• Working with machine learning teams and technology
• Japanese language proficiency

Team culture

The Cogent Labs engineering department is continuously working towards developing a culture improving and rewarding the following qualities:

• Team effort: A cohesive team can be more effective than an isolated prodigy. Engineers are expected to work well in groups and look for opportunities to empower their colleagues.
• Ownership: Take full responsibility for your own projects and tasks and if needed, cross over boundaries in order to successfully deliver your project.
• Self-improvement: Create an environment where engineers can focus on their engineering tasks and self-improvement without excessive outside disturbances.
• Experimentation: Engineers should have some freedom in experimenting with new ideas and technologies, as this ultimately could translate into building better products or the creation of valuable new IP.
• Quality & Excellence: Maintaining a mindset of developing high quality features and code. We avoid cutting corners as much as possible.
• Customer Service: Being customer focused, not only externally but internally as well.  This means developing services that not only improve the experience of our end customers, but also being ‘customer service’ oriented within your team and the company as a whole by helping out others and sharing knowledge.

The ideal candidate:

• can empathize Cogent Labs’ VISION and MISSION
• is a team player who aims for higher goals
• has integrity and humility, and shows respect and gratitude to others
• prefers open and transparent communication
• has a strong growth mindset
• can receive feedback positively and provide constructive feedback to others