【Backend Engineer】Recipe Video Platform | Hybrid Work | Japanese Business-level

★[Budget-Saving Recipe App] Backend Engineer (Architect)

• Japanese: Business Level REQUIRED

★Hybrid Work

★Annual salary: 9.5 million yen - 15 million yen

★In-house Development

-------------【About the company】-------------

【Planning, Operations & Development】

Recipe Video Platform

Budget-Saving Application

AI Agent Infrastructure for Manufacturers, Wholesalers & Retailers

Lifestyle Media Platform

Creator Management Agency

■About the Company

The company aims to be an organization that delivers a bright and powerful impact to the world through its services, contributing globally by continuously launching and scaling new businesses.

Starting with its foundational recipe video platform, the company has successfully rolled out multiple services that serve as essential infrastructure for daily life, achieving rapid and continuous corporate growth.

■Services

You will be involved in the development of either the recipe video platform or the budget-saving application.

・Recipe Video Platform

Operating under the concept of "Making daily life delicious and warm," this is Japan's No. 1 recipe video service, offering simple and delicious recipes fully supervised by registered dietitians. In October 2024, the application achieved a major milestone, surpassing 44 million cumulative downloads.

・Budget-Saving Application

This platform is designed to transform daily shopping into a more rewarding and cost-effective experience. Launched as the sister app to the No. 1 recipe video platform, it has rapidly surpassed 10 million downloads, driven by rising consumer inflation and a growing societal focus on saving money. The service features a mechanism where users earn points through everyday shopping behaviors, such as browsing digital store flyers or physically commuting to retail locations.

-------------【 Job Description】-------------

■The Company Today & The Future Vision

The company operates a premier recipe video platform that has achieved over 44 million cumulative downloads and serves 56 million users monthly.

Through this recipe-centric engine, the organization has built a massive operational infrastructure with 41 million monthly active users, generating an immense wealth of data surrounding food and daily cooking habits. However, providing recipes only addresses a fraction of a user's daily life. To evolve into a comprehensive lifestyle infrastructure service, the company set its sights on the core activity that occurs right before and after cooking: shopping. This vision led to the 2022 launch of the budget-saving application.

Since its launch, the budget-saving app has achieved over 10 million cumulative downloads, reached 2.92 million monthly active users (MAU), and maintained a hyper-growth rate of 466% annually. Achieving Product-Market Fit (PMF) at a growth rate rarely seen in consumer-facing services, the platform has officially entered its "10 to 100" scaling phase.

■Upcoming Strategic Challenges

The immense volume of receipt and transaction data captured and assetized through the company's budget-saving application represents one of the largest first-party datasets in Japan. Combining the foundational platform utilized by 41 million monthly users with this highly unique, primary purchasing-behavior data gives the company an unparalleled competitive edge.

Currently, the engineering team is building out a modern data stack utilizing Snowflake and dbt to fully unlock this information asset. With this infrastructure as a bedrock, the company is embarking on large-scale business development that intersects first-party purchasing data with advanced AI applications.

Operating within this deeply data-driven environment, the team maintains an ultra-fast product iteration cycle: deploying a feature one day, evaluating its impact the next morning, adjusting strategies during the daily stand-up, and immediately executing the next move to deliver continuous, tangible value to the users.

■Why an Architect Is Needed Right Now

The company's "budget-saving recipe app" is growing rapidly with an annual growth rate of 466% and over 10 million cumulative downloads, entering a 10-to-100 scaling phase. Along with this growth, multiple domains and functions—such as receipt uploads, affiliate marketing, digital flyers, and games—have become concentrated within a single Rails monolith on the backend. Making re-architecture decisions with an eye toward future service growth and driving AI-driven development forward on an organizational level have become key challenges.

On the other hand, the daily cycle of feature development and hypothesis testing cannot be stopped. Technical leadership capable of balancing both aspects—"rebuilding the foundations of the system while moving the product forward"—is the position that the company needs most right now. The current team lacks members who can fulfill this role, and the company is seeking someone who can join and lead decision-making in design and architecture.

■Responsibilities

As a Backend Architect, you will lead system design and technical decision-making while driving feature development for the receipt-based loyalty infrastructure.

Architect Domain

Diagnosing current bottlenecks in the backend system, as well as formulating and driving re-architecture strategies.

Serving as the primary driver for technical decisions, including design reviews, technology selection, and the definition of non-functional requirements.

Instilling technical decision-making frameworks and raising the engineering baseline across junior-to-mid-level tiers.

Development Domain

Designing and developing new features using Ruby on Rails.

Enhancing and refactoring existing capabilities.

Optimizing the performance of API endpoints.

Managing infrastructure updates utilizing IaC.

Improving development velocity by maintaining and automating CI/CD pipelines.

Elevating code quality through rigorous code reviews and design reviews.

Providing mentorship and technical support to junior-and-mid-level engineers.

The first few months after joining the company will be designated as an onboarding period to deepen the understanding of systems, specifications, and the team. Following this phase, the person is expected to lead the process from problem definition through to re-architecture design.

-------------【 Requirements】-------------

Required

Experience actively participating in decisions regarding system design and architecture

Experience in server-side development, API design, and operations for web services or mobile apps (approximately 5 years or more)

Experience in designing and operating RDBMS and NoSQL databases

Experience in design that takes performance optimization and scalability into account

Experience with Agile development

Preferred

Experience in designing, building, and operating cloud infrastructure / Experience in building and managing infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (e.g., AWS)

Experience in building and operating CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins)

Experience in designing and improving systems with a focus on scalability, availability, security, performance, and cost optimization

Experience providing technical support and mentoring to teams in a Tech Lead or equivalent role

Ideal Applicants

Take the lead in making technical decisions and take responsibility for the results

Find joy in articulating “why we’re choosing this design” and raising the quality of the team’s technical decisions

Do not separate technical challenges from product challenges, and make design decisions that directly contribute to business growth

In design decisions where there is no single “right” answer, make independent judgments while continuing to work with the team through dialogue to find the optimal solution

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【Working Time 】

9:00~18:00

【Childcare & Parenting Support Programs】

- Pre- and Post-Natal Leave

- Parental Leave (Taken by both men and women; 100% return-to-work rate)

- Currently promoting the use of parental leave by men

- Childcare Leave (5 days per year; can be taken in hourly increments)

- Leave to Be Present at Childbirth (Up to 2 consecutive days)

- Reduced-Hours Work Program (To accommodate childcare, elder care, etc.)

- Discounted Babysitting Vouchers

【Health & Mental Health Support Programs】

- Regular health checkups

- Vaccination support

- Consultations with the company physician

- Life Bridge Program (a program that allows employees to work remotely for a limited time in the event of a family emergency or health concerns)

- Implementation of Wevox (to visualize organizational motivation and engagement)

- Fully equipped care rooms

【Internal Company Benefits & Programs】

- Full social insurance(Employment Insurance, Workers’ Compensation Insurance, Health Insurance (Kanto ITS), and Employees’ Pension Insurance)

- Commuting allowance (up to 40,000 yen per month)

- Side jobs permitted (subject to approval based on company guidelines)

- Peripheral equipment purchase assistance for engineers and designers (up to 50,000 yen)

- Introduction of a housing benefit service

【Internal Culture & Communication Programs】

- Year-End Party (A company-wide event held at the end of the year)

- Recognition Program (Awards are presented to employees who embody our values at the company-wide general meeting held every half-year)

- Pit-In Meeting (A short company-wide morning meeting held every Monday)

- All-Hands Meetings (Monthly meetings held by business division)

- AI Workshops (Conducted in-house as part of efforts to improve operational efficiency and support reskilling)

- Thanks Message Program (A culture of expressing gratitude to one another using special cards)

- Referral Hiring Incentive Program

- Welcome Lunch

- Club Activities

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