Mercari - Staff Engineer - Backend Architecture

Description :

The Backend Architecture / Staff Engineering function plays a pivotal role in shaping Mercari's marketplace and product platforms. This role sits at the intersection of architecture, product impact, and technical leadership, enabling multiple teams to build faster, safer, and at scale.

Responsibilities :

- Help build critical systems : Design and evolve high-scale distributed product services (Advantage : Golang, GCP, ES) with reliability, cost, and latency SLAs. Unblock teams with complex design problems, and make 2-4 teams materially faster & ship with higher quality/speed

- Raise the bar : Set engineering standards through architecture reviews, coding patterns/ reviews, and technical decision ownership, where needed

- Multiply Talent at Mercari : Help form a healthy organisation structure, define guidelines on service development, testing, deployment, and monitoring to the whole engineering organisation, including Mentor senior engineers, set and accelerate forums for learning among senior engineers

- AI-led delivery : Lead PoCs and production use of AI tools (coding agents, test gen, refactoring, observability) to 2 delivery and innovation.

Requirements :

- A related technical degree is required.

- Strong command of multiple programming languages and middleware.

- At least 8+ years of experience in a variety of hands-on software/technology roles, preferably in Consumer Internet Products & Solutions in the cloud.

- Deep experience building and running distributed systems in cloud-native environments (GCP, Kubernetes).

- Proven projects and results in building large product surfaces, not just services, but customer-visible outcomes.

- Strong system design, data modelling, and production debugging skills.

- Experience in building systems with 99.95 uptime

- Ability to influence architecture across multiple teams without formal authority.

- Exceptional written and verbal communication in pursuit of driving the mission forward.

- Influencing skills in balancing short and long-term objectives, including technical and business outcomes.

- Experience with search, personalisation, or data platforms (e. g., Elasticsearch, event streams, ML pipelines).

- Fluency with React-based frontends and forward-looking API design patterns.

- Prior work in high-scale consumer platforms (in terms of qps/traffic and complexity).

- Experience driving platformization or tech simplification.

- Ability to build an environment for clear and open discussion of all issues.

- You involve the right people, from your team and others, to resolve critical issues.