Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

About SmartNews

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, and Singapore.

The Team

The Data Platform Team is responsible for building systems that will power the next 5 years of SmartNews data analytics. They develop and maintain common data platforms, ETL pipelines and data analytics infrastructure that can operate with low latency and high reliability while maintaining 99.99% uptime or above.

The Role

As a Data Platform Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring that data within the SmartNews environment is highly available, with minimal latency and correctly transferred.  You will be a key architect in building and maintaining systems that will power the data use at SmartNews for the next five years. Your expertise will contribute to the foundation that supports SmartNews' ambitious growth goals.

Your Reponsibilities

• Be the team SME expert in Data pipelines
• Develop and realize the overall data strategy for the company
• Develop and manage ETL/ELT pipelines and infrastructure of analytics databases
• Cooperate with the product team, data science team to design data features to enable product improvement and timely business KPI measurements.
• Be involved in data technology and security to be able to help design the next generation of data platform infrastructure
• Determine the importance of each dataset and take appropriate measures to ensure data reliability and quality according to priority
• Improve the reliability and speed of queries for ever-increasing volumes of data
• Implement new types of data workflows (e.g. automatic retraining of machine learning models for predicting user churn)
• Build dashboards to visualize key metrics

Requirements

Minimum requirements

• At least 2 years of team lead experience
• Able to prioritize and work on data issues ranging from overall data strategy to detailed data modification
• Experience with data warehousing and business intelligence systems
• 5 years of programming experience (understand multiple languages)
• Experience with Hive, Airflow, Scylla, Redis, Elastic search
• Experience in development related to Spark, Hadoop, Flink, Clickhouse, Presto/Trino
• Experience with data processing related to an app or website.
• Experience with Modern Machine Learning technologies
• Have architected/implemented a data warehouse
• Experience designing and creating data tables
• English as the working language
• BS degree or above in related fields
• Experience with AWS (EC2, Kinesis, EMR, S3, etc.)

Nice to have experiences/skills

• Experience in dashboard development with modern tools, such as Tableau or Superset
• Experience with infrastructure or data workflows for machine learning
• Knowledge of real-time streaming data systems
• Strong interest in new big data tools and technologies
• Business-level Japanese

Benefits

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