Engineering Manager (PayPay Card)

About PayPay CardPayPay is a FinTech company that in the six years since its launch in 2018, has surpassed 70 million users (as of July 2025) and is rapidly expanding its business scale as a payment platform used by approximately one in two smartphone users in Japan.PayPay Card was established in 2021 to provide users with more accessible and convenient FinTech services that were previously not possible with credit cards and credit services by integrating with the PayPay payment platform. We are looking for professionals who are passionate about refining our products at an overwhelming speed that no other company can match, and promoting the spread of cashless payments in Japan and the financial life platform that uses them. We are looking for people who are passionate about this.Job DescriptionPayPay 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 processes as well. For this reason, we are looking for Engineering Managers (EM) with Japanese conversational abilities that not only make the team deliver timely with quality, but also can be a language and cultural bridge between the team and the different stakeholders.The engineers of your team will mainly be English speakers but your stakeholders include Japanese speakers. Although we are introducing more and more English in our discussions, you will be expected to have frequent communication in Japanese.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 ResponsibilitiesYou will be in charge of a Web Backend engineering team. Your main responsibility is to ensure that the team can operate overcoming communication challenges as well as a constantly changing environment. Your future responsibilities include, but are not limited to:Execution: support the team to ensure timely and high-quality deliveriesAssign team members to appropriate projects, depending on the engineer skill sets and project requirementsBackup team members to ensure they can progress in their task such as fetching missing information, defusing conflict, handling emergencies, etcCoordinate, and if necessary negotiate or arbitrate, with different stakeholders, potentially in Japanese, to ensure that both product and architecture decisions are sustainable and scalable.Operation: create levers to allow the team to continuously improve from delivery, reliability, and developer experience standpointsIdentify and address pain points which hinders development, deliveries and developer experience, from a process, tooling and system perspectiveEnhance the development process so that it suits the team and sustains a steady developmentGrowth: bring the team to the next level to reach a healthy and motivating environmentEnable people growth with practices such as efficient 1:1Support the end-to-end employee lifecycle: from on-boarding to off-boarding, through performance evaluationContribute to the technical roadmap of the team, ensuring that technical debt is tackledTech StackWe currently work withApplications:Backend systems:New systems are implemented in Kotlin + Spring Boot for new systemsExisting systems are a mix of Java + Spring Boot or Java EEService to service communications are using gRPC and KafkaFrontend: Vue.js 3, Nuxt.js, TypeScriptInfrastructure:AWS-centric, Terraform-managedGrafana & Prometheus for observabilityOpenSearch for loggingOther tools:Slack / GitHub / JIRA / Confluence / Google WorkspaceRequired QualificationsTo 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 implementationHas 2 years, or more, of experience of leading web application engineer teamsHas past experience as software engineer, backend or frontendHas proven records of significant contributions to scalable architectures and system designsHas solid tasks definition and breakdown skillsSoft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholdersHas good stakeholder management, coordination and conflict handling skillsSpeaks and writes business level EnglishSpeaks and writes conversational Japanese. It is essential that managers can discuss with non-English speakers.Leadership: taking the team to the next levelFocuses on people growth successIs able to efficiently follow-up the progress, and blockers, for all on-going tasksHas a genuine care for continuous improvement and developer experienceHas interviewing experiencePreferred QualificationsAdditionally, 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 implementationHas good awareness regarding security mattersHas domain driven development experienceHas credit card industry implementation experience, specifically PCI-DSS compliant implementationSoft skills: interacting smoothly with stakeholdersIs able to drive the team though a quickly changing environmentIs able to navigate meeting dynamics, from letting the attendees speaking up to steering back the conversationLeadership: taking the team to the next levelIs inclined to target engineering excellencyIs versed in observabilityIs an example of good work ethics, including "Diversity & Inclusion"