Engineering Manager

PayPay Card, member of the PayPay Group, embraced the challenge of internationalizing its engineering divisions. Additionally, we are revisiting our technical architecture and strive to make it right, improving scalability, maintainability and performances. To make it happen, we also go through rethinking our organization and work processes as well. For this reason, we are looking for Engineering Managers (EM) that not only make teams deliver timely with quality, but also can contribute to such organization change. As architecture and organization are the two faces of the same coin, EM and Tech Leads will work closely to align organization roadmap and the architecture roadmap. 

In your day-to-day basis, you will obviously interact with engineers but also a wide range of stakeholders: 

• Product Managers, Designers and QA for project execution
• PMO for project management
• TA for hiring and HRBP for employee lifecycle
• Other managers for long term strategy. 

The engineers of your team will all be English speakers but there will be Japanese speakers among your stakeholders. Having English as our working language is our objective and we are currently transitioning.

This is a rare opportunity to take part in significant organizational changes as well as unprecedented technical challenges. While the company business is quite established, the engineering challenges we are tackling are on par with the hypergrowth style of challenges. You will be able to, and encouraged to, bring your ideas to sharpen our vision, may it be related to technical, organization or human matters.

Main Responsibilities

You will be in charge of an application engineering team, most of our teams are backend teams. In short, your main responsibility is to ensure that the team can operate and grow. This will require you to switch between tactical leadership, almost being hands-on, and strategic planning. The environment changes quickly so you will face the challenge to identify the appropriate area of focus, according to the circumstances. To name some responsibilities you will cover, with a different degrees of focus depending on the situation:

Execution: support the team to ensure timely and high-quality deliveries

• Tactical
• Assign team members to appropriate projects, depending on the engineer skill sets and project requirements
• Backup team members to ensure they can progress in their task such as fetching missing information, defusing conflict, handling emergencies, etc
• Strategic
• Encourage people growth with practices such as efficient 1:1
• Support the end-to-end employee lifecycle: from on-boarding to off-boarding, through performance evaluation

Operation: create levers to allow the team to continuously improve from delivery, reliability, and developer experience standpoints

• Tactical
  • Identify and address pain points which hinders development, deliveries and developer experience, from a process, tooling and system perspective.
  • Coordinate, and if necessary negotiate or arbitrate, with different stakeholders to ensure that both product and architecture decisions are sustainable and scalable.
• Strategic
  • Architect and implement a development process that suits the team and sustains a steady development
  • Contribute to product and technical roadmap to bring added value to both the product and the technical stacks owned by the team

Growth: prepare the team(s), and surrounding stakeholders, to organizational and technical changes to open the path for a healthy growth

• Tactical
  • Identify growth opportunity and changes that impacts the team structure, raise them and contribute to address them if applicable
  • Identify missing or bloated communications flows which often calls for a workflow reconsideration. Similarly, support your team when raised architecture concerns which calls for a system redesign consideration
• Strategic
  • Contribute to the hiring strategy as well as the different hiring implementation steps
  • Provide sufficient flexibility in the team structure and processes to get the team ready for the upcoming changes

Tech Stack

We currently work with the following.

Applications:

• Backend systems: Kotlin + Spring Boot for new systems, Java + Spring Boot or Java EE for existing systems
• Frontend: Vue.js 3, Nuxt.js, TypeScript

Infrastructure:

• AWS: to deploy services, databases, etc.
• GCP: for BigQuery

Other tools:

• Slack / GitHub / JIRA / Confluence / Google Workspace

Required Qualifications

To provide a portrait of the candidates we are looking, we would like to establish the following skills as our baseline:

Technical skills: contributing to the implementation

• Has 2 years, or more, of experience of leading web application engineer teams
• Has past experience as software engineer, backend or frontend
• Has proven records of significant contributions to scalable architectures and system designs
• Has solid tasks definition and breakdown skills, when provided functional requirements

Soft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholders

• Has good stakeholder management, coordination and conflict handling skills
• Speaks and writes business level English
• Has interest in Japanese language & culture

Leadership: taking the team to the next level

• Focuses on people growth success
• Is able to efficiently follow-up the progress, and blockers, for all on-going tasks
• Has a genuine care for continuous improvement and developer experience

Strategy: defining and implementing a vision

• Has experience building or contributing to technical roadmaps
• Has interviewing experience

Preferred Qualifications

Additionally, we gladly welcome the following skills as bonus points, which hopefully draw the canvas of the engineering culture we want to create:

Technical skills: contributing to the implementation

• Has good awareness regarding security matters
• Has domain driven development experience
• Has credit card industry implementation experience, specifically PCI-DSS compliant implementation

Soft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholders

• Has proficiency in change management
• Is able to navigate meeting dynamics, from letting the attendees speaking up to steering back the conversation
• Speaks and writes conversational Japanese

Leadership: taking the team to the next level

• Crafted successful development processes
• Has experience building and maintaining on-boarding and off-boarding processes to support the employee lifecycle
• Is versed in observability to measure engineering excellence
• Is an example of good work ethics, including "Diversity & Inclusion"

Strategy: defining and implementing a vision

• Has experience defining hiring strategy & implementation
• Has experience significantly contributing to product strategy, with data-driven decisions