Engineering Manager (SRE)

Location: Yokohama, Japan; regular onsite work in the Yokohama area is required. Hybrid working combines in-person collaboration with focused remote work. The role includes an engineering escalation rotation.

Company

hirify.global is building an AI platform for autonomous driving that learns from real-world experience and supports scalable deployment across global vehicle manufacturers.

What you will do

• Lead and develop the Japan Fleet Reliability SRE team, owning hiring, performance, career development, capacity, and escalation coverage.
• Improve the safety, availability, incident recovery, rollout reliability, and data workflows of the autonomous vehicle fleet.
• Lead high-severity engineering incidents and turn blameless reviews into measurable, durable improvements.
• Set technical direction for observability, SLI/SLOs, production readiness, release safety, automation, remote diagnostics, and fleet tooling.
• Partner with Vehicle Software, Fleet Operations, Field Engineering, platform, safety, infrastructure, and programme teams to move vehicles and capabilities into stable operations.
• Represent Japan’s priorities in global roadmaps and communicate risks and decisions with Japanese OEMs, suppliers, mobility partners, and hirify.global leaders.

Requirements

• Engineering-management experience with direct accountability for a software, SRE, platform, systems, or similarly technical team.
• Experience leading and developing approximately 5–10 engineers or a similarly complex multidisciplinary group.
• Practical mastery of reliability engineering, observability, incident management, release and change safety, resilience, and continuous improvement.
• Strong engineering depth in design reviews, debugging, automation, code reviews, production systems, roadmaps, resourcing, and technical trade-offs.
• Experience hiring, coaching, developing, and managing performance while creating accountability and psychological safety.
• Permission to work in Japan or eligibility for employer-supported immigration; regular onsite work in Yokohama is required.

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive software, embedded or edge computing, safety-critical systems, or large physical fleets.
• Experience with vehicle commissioning, sensor or compute integration, networking, diagnostics, data offload, or over-the-air deployment.
• Experience with Linux, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, telemetry pipelines, infrastructure as code, and modern observability tooling.
• Experience building internal automation or platforms in Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or a comparable language.
• Experience collaborating with Japanese automotive manufacturers, suppliers, or mobility operators in a global engineering organisation.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working with collaboration in dedicated offices and flexibility for focused remote work.
• Hands-on work in vehicle workshops and labs, with core hours.
• Market-benchmarked salaries, meaningful equity, and learning and development budgets.
• Health and dental insurance, enhanced parental leave, retirement or pension benefits where applicable, therapy access, wellbeing partnerships, and team socials.
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable.

Hiring process

• Initial recruiter call lasting 30 minutes.
• Competency interviews with the hiring manager lasting approximately one hour in total.
• Deep-dive technical interviews covering SRE skills, programming, and a team meet, followed by a one-hour final mission and values interview.