Engineering Manager (DBRE)

Location: Hybrid role based in Minato, Tokyo, with office work in Roppongi, Japan

Company

hirify.global operates a marketplace platform that connects people and circulates value through technology.

What you will do

• Manage, mentor, and hire a diverse Database Reliability Engineering team.
• Define and execute the technical vision, strategy, and roadmap for hirify.global’s database infrastructure.
• Oversee mission-critical database reliability, lead high-severity incident response, and drive post-incident reviews.
• Lead the migration from the legacy on-premise data center to TiDB Cloud and establish the future cloud-native operating model.
• Drive cost optimization through shard consolidation, resource right-sizing, archiving strategies, and architecture improvements.
• Collaborate with Platform Infrastructure, SRE, Observability, FinOps, and Product teams.

Requirements

• Experience managing or leading an engineering team, preferably in SRE, DBRE, or infrastructure.
• Strong knowledge of MySQL, TiDB, PostgreSQL, database architecture, performance tuning, and high-availability design.
• Experience with GCP or AWS and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• Experience managing incidents and leading post-mortem and root-cause analysis processes.
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical risks to non-technical leaders.
• Japanese proficiency at CEFR B1 level is required; English at CEFR B1 level is preferred.

Nice to have

• Production experience with large-scale distributed databases such as TiDB, Spanner, or Vitess.
• FinOps or cloud cost management experience.
• Software development experience with Go or Python.
• Experience leading major infrastructure or database migrations.
• Knowledge of SLO/SLI definition and error budget management.

Culture & Benefits

• Full flextime with no core time.
• Focus on psychological safety, continuous learning, operational excellence, and open collaboration.
• Engineering principles include product focus, growing together, solving through mechanisms, and collaborating openly.

Hiring process

• Application screening followed by an engineering skills assessment through HackerRank or GitHub.
• Interviews, with the number varying by position, followed by an online reference check.
• Final offer decision based on the interviews and reference check.