Staff Backend Engineer

Are you looking

• To make meaningful changes at the fastest-growing tech company in Japan?
• For a fair, highly flexible, inclusive working environment where anyone, regardless of their background, can make an impact?
• To build the next bold idea in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology
• For a place where things are not just fast - but they happen now? 

We Are Zeals - “Designing conversations. Driving conversions.”

Zeals is not another chatbot. Our automated chat solution and conversational technology change how consumers purchase or act online. Zeals converts customers who appear "unengaged" to become "valuable" through designed chat on Messaging Apps. Using AI-powered, human-designed conversation flows across chat platforms, Zeals enables brands to build personalized, automated conversations with their consumers and develop a deeper understanding of their preferences while creating a delightful, seamless shopping experience. Our last 3 years have been phenomenal. We have captured the heart of many businesses in Japan, with over 480 enterprises relying on our chat commerce offering to boost their mobile business.

The goal is simple: to “revolutionize hospitality on the Internet” by unlocking digital customer service experiences that were limited to physical stores previously. 

Just Getting Started…

With more than 480 enterprise companies worldwide already utilizing our product, we are perfectly poised to seize market share and fuel exponential growth in the US market, with an eye on global expansion. Investors have taken note of our potential, leading us to recently secure nearly $40 million in funding, backed by Salesforce Ventures.

As our Staff Backend Engineer

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be a key player in our engineering team, responsible for designing, building, and maintaining our backend systems and infrastructure. You will work on developing robust APIs, optimizing server performance, and ensuring seamless integration with Frontend applications. Your work will ensure the smooth operation and scalability of our systems, supporting the needs of various stakeholders and enabling advanced functionalities.

Your Typical Day With Us

• Development with a focus on Clean Architecture of new services in Golang, using REST and gRPC interfaces
• Migration of interfaces from our legacy system as applicable (written in Python and Ruby).
• Design and implement features aligned with DDD architecture while documenting API specifications and data flow.
• Managing a team of engineers, mentoring, and guiding them to the next level
• Discover and triage issues with performance, reliability, maintainability, and extensibility.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and implement scalable solution
• Depending on the team, participation in an on-call rotation with additional compensation might be required.

What You’ll Need

• Proficiency in development flow based on git and GitHub
• 8+ years of experience in Software Engineering or a similar role, with preferably experience in Golang
• Strong sense of testing, including unit tests and integration tests
• Ability to communicate recommendations for improvements on current systems, processes, and services as needed
• Exhibit a strong ability to adapt in a dynamic and ever-changing environment
• Ability to solve problems, especially to identify the source of the problem, and create and test solutions
• Experience with Elasticsearch, including setting up, configuring, and maintaining Elasticsearch clusters
• Proven team-leading experience with the ability to mentor and guide team members

What Makes You Stand Out

• Working knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, and Clean Architecture
• Working knowledge of gRPC and RESTful API
• Working knowledge of RDB and SQL
• Experience in Google Cloud Platform
• Experience in Continuous Integration tools like CircleCI
• Experience in issue management systems like Jira
• Japanese communication skills
• Experience in development using Python, Ruby, NodeJS
• Experience in using tracing and metrics in deriving performance optimizations and troubleshooting

 Don’t just take our word for it 

Zeals has received the LinkedIn Top Startups award twice in a row. We believe this is a testament to our growth and our ability to attract great talents–who could potentially be your colleague! 

• Backend Languages: Go, Python, Elixir
• Frontend Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (TypeScript, React.js, Recoil, Zod, Tanstack, etc)
• Mobile Languages: None
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, GCP Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Qdrant
• Configuration management tool: Terraform
• CI/CD: Github Actions, ArgoCD, CircleCI
• Monitoring: Grafana, GCP Cloud Monitoring, GCP Logging, GCP Cloud Trace, Opsgenie
• Data: BigQuery, Parquet, Spark, Scala, Python, dbt
• Knowledge Tools: Confluence
• Other: GitHub / Slack / Jira
• Process: Scrum

 Ready to roll up our sleeves

We obsess over bringing hospitality to everyone–be it our customers or you! You’re an individual with unique needs. So, While we can’t attract you with ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers that you can brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out for a party! . As an employer we are ready to roll-up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means to make your experience better!

• Salary Range : competitive (performance review every 6 months)
• Performance review: twice a year
• Holidays: 10 days paid holidays during the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter break. 
• Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates. You can expect full visa support from our professional HR team. 
• Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first international organization 
• For Japanese residence: Work from anywhere, interim work from overseas, full flex time
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office)
• Club activity allowance
• Shuffle Lunch allowance (Cross department lunch)
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party)