Smart News 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, Smart News has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, and Singapore.
The Team
The User Feature Delivery team is dedicated to enhancing our users' news reading experience with innovative and impactful products. As a full-stack team, we take ownership of both backend systems and user-facing features on the web. Over the past year, we’ve launched a dynamic mission and rewards platform for news readers, developed a comprehensive live sporting events product, and empowered users to save and share their favorite content seamlessly at scale. We are committed to delivering rapid, positive changes for our users while maintaining high standards of system quality and maintainability.
The Mission
In this role, you will lead the design and implementation of new features across our products, focusing on enhancing user interactions with our content. You will work across the full stack, contributing to both frontend and backend development as we continuously evolve our products to deliver a rewarding news reading experience for both our users and content partners.
Your responsibilities will include maintaining mature backend systems that drive user interactions and manage features such as Follow, Bookmarks, and Points within our apps. You will uphold best security practices, ensuring user data is handled responsibly to enhance the user experience and deliver more relevant, high-quality news to our readers. On the frontend, you will bring compelling features to life, ensuring a seamless and engaging experience in the app.
Your technical expertise will be critical in managing priorities, meeting deadlines, and delivering products in close collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders across the company. We are looking for someone who brings fresh ideas to problems, values rigor in engineering solutions and is driven by the goal of delivering new, exciting experiences for our users.
Role and Responsibilities:

• Lead the full-stack development of key features within the Smart News product.
• Design, build, test, deploy, maintain and improve full-stack systems.
• Participate in system design, code reviews, and on-call rotation to maintain high-quality standards for code and ensure the reliability of mission-critical systems.
• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to prioritize, plan and deliver new products to our customers.

Requirements
Minimum requirements

• 3+ years software development experience with proven expertise in both backend and frontend development.
• 1+ year in full-stack development, experience with both backend (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Golang) and frontend (e.g., Java Script/Type Script, HTML) technologies.
• Experience designing, building, testing, and maintaining large-scale backend systems, including implementing CI/CD pipelines and managing deployments with Docker/Kubernetes.
• Exceptional communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Effective business-level English skills.

Nice to have experiences/skills

• Effective communication skills in Japanese.
• 1 year or more in a tech lead role.
• Knowledge and experience with AWS cloud resources.

Working condition

• Office Location: Tokyo

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Benefits

• Annual health check covered by the company
• Visa sponsorship and overseas relocation support available for eligible candidates

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