Unlocking potential

SmartNews is a global leader in redefining information and news discovery, committed to providing users with accurate, timely information and supporting quality journalism. We combine the power of our unique machine-learning technology with the expertise of our first-rate editorial team to bring news that matters to millions of users from our over 3,000 global publishing partners. Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan, SmartNews has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore.

The Team

The Platform Infrastructure team is responsible for operating the fundamental Kubernetes orchestration platform hosting both stateless application services and stateful data platforms for other developer teams in SmartNews. They provide the self-service continuous integration and delivery platform with a focus on increasing deployment frequency and change stability, and offer a comprehensive observability platform covering monitoring, logging and tracing.

What you'll be doing

• Support users(our developers) by understanding the requirements and providing solution
• Empower teams to provide reliable systems. Facilitate the operation of service level objectives (SLO), on-call rotations and blameless post-mortems
• Drive the construction of a multi-regional cloud-native infrastructure that delivers performance to our global user base
• Optimize the processes for trimming down infrastructure costs and tuning our fleet of instances for maximum efficiency

Required experience

• Administration experience in container orchestration platforms, preferably using Kubernetes and demonstrated by the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certificate
• Experience in observability (monitoring, logging and tracing) for cloud-based environments, using CNCF tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Thanos, Jaeger or SaaS tools such as Datadog
• Expertise in maintaining self-service CI/CD platforms and supporting techniques like Trunk-Based development, GitOps-based deployments or automated canary releases
• Production experience in at least one programming language, for example Go (strongly preferred), Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript
• Business level communication in English

Nice to have

• Strong knowledge of fundamental AWS services with a certification as an AWS Associate or above
• Proficiency in operating public cloud services using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
• Passion to stay up-to-date with latest industry topics in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), DevOps and the AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Knowledge of common application architecture patterns: distributed systems, microservices, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, and others

Benefits available at the SmartNews Tokyo Office

• Lunch and snacks prepared daily in our on-site kitchen facility
• In-office coffee stand offering single-origin coffees, espresso-based beverages, teas, and other seasonal drinks
• SmartSelect, our support program for employee self-development, well-being, and productivity
• All healthcare and social insurance required by the Japanese labor law

Visa Sponsorship and Relocation Support

• Work visa sponsorship is available for candidates who meet eligibility requirements
• To support a smooth transition for candidates who are moving to Japan from overseas, SmartNews partners with a travel service provider