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Senior Platform Infrastructure Engineer - Mercari

Open 23d

Summary

Designs, operates, and scales Mercari’s internal Kubernetes platform and infrastructure-as-code, enabling hundreds of engineers to deploy microservices safely and quickly while abstracting operational complexity.

本ポジションは日本語JDの用意がありません。


Senior Platform Infrastructure Engineer - Mercari

  • Employment Status: Full-time
  • Work Hours: Full Flextime (no core time)
  • Office: Roppongi (hybrid)

For more details, see the Overview of Our Positions section on our Careers site.

  

About Mercari

Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people

"What can I do to help society thrive with the finite resources we have?" The Mercari marketplace app was born in 2013 out of this thought by our founder Shintaro Yamada as he traveled the world. We believe that by circulating all forms of value, not just physical things and money, we can create opportunities for anyone to realize their dreams and contribute to society and the people around them. Mercari aims to use technology to connect people all over the world and create a world where anyone can unleash their potential. For more information about Mercari Group’s mission, see Mercari’s Culture Doc

Organization/Team Mission

Mercari Engineering Principles

Mercari Engineering Principles are a shared understanding that serves as the foundation of engineering beliefs and behavior at Mercari. The Engineering Principles are designed to complement the organizational identity (Mercari’s mission, values, and culture) from an engineering viewpoint.

These principles ultimately help us achieve Mercari’s mission by defining the ideal state we seek to realize in the long term.

  • Passion For The Product
  • Grow Together
  • Solve Through Mechanisms
  • Collaborate Openly

For more details, please see the following link:

  • Engineering Culture

The Autonomous Cloud group in the Platform Division builds and operates the foundational infrastructure that lets every engineering team at Mercari ship products safely and quickly - covering the Kubernetes platform, search infrastructure, observability, networking, and FinOps. Our charter is to make complex infrastructure simple to consume, so product teams can spend their time on customer value rather than on running systems.

The Platform Infrastructure team - part of the Autonomous Cloud division - runs Mercari's Kubernetes platform and Infrastructure-as-Code as a managed service for engineering teams across the company. We operate the GKE clusters that host most of Mercari's microservices, own the Terraform code that provisions and evolve them, and build the developer-facing "kits" that let hundreds of engineers spin up new microservices and on-call setup in minutes rather than days. Our job is to abstract away the operational complexity of the platform so product teams can focus on building features. We are a team that combines hands-on operation of the clusters with deep expertise in Kubernetes internals and IaC-at-scale - partnering closely with Search Infra, Network, Observability, FinOps, DBRE, and Enablement teams.

See here for more information about our mission and values.

Work Responsibilities

  • Co-own the GKE cluster lifecycle: upgrades, node-pool strategy, add-on management (Cert Manager, autoscaling, workload identity), capacity planning, and incident response.
  • Own and evolve the Terraform IaC: custom modules, large-blast-radius migrations, and the Terraform CI/CD that keeps changes safe at scale - drift detection, staged rollout, revert planning, and pipeline reliability.
  • Build and maintain "kits" - reusable Terraform modules and self-service tooling that let product teams provision repos (with CODEOWNERS), PagerDuty, GitHub Actions workflows, and deployment pipelines without infra hand-holding.
  • Own autoscaling and capacity at scale: Cluster Autoscaler / HPA / VPA, cost-aware right-sizing, and multi-region and node-pool strategies for large workloads.
  • Ship internal developer-platform components in Go: k8s controllers, CLIs and internal APIs, and AI agent skills that cut friction on the most-used developer paths.
  • Join the Platform on-call rotation after ramp-up; lead root-cause analysis and follow-through improvements.
  • Drive reliability, security, and developer-experience initiatives in partnership with FinOps, Network, Observability, DBRE, and Enablement teams.

Unique Challenges

  • Kubernetes at multi-tenant scale - We run GKE clusters that host hundreds of microservices deployed by teams across the company. Node-pool strategy (autoscaling, spot, ARM diversification), control-plane and add-on upgrade cadence, and workload isolation are everyday work. Every change to a shared Terraform module, a GKE add-on, or a kit touches all of those services at once, so getting the design and the rollout right up-front is a core part of the job.
  • Custom controllers, admission policy, and add-on ownership - A meaningful part of the platform is our own Kubernetes controllers, admission webhooks, and policy layer (RBAC, network policies, OPA / Gatekeeper) that keep a multi-tenant cluster safe and predictable. You design and run these, not just consume upstream.
  • Multi-region and multi-architecture roadmap - We are actively expanding to a multi-region topology and adopting different k8s node-types for cost and capacity headroom. You will help shape this rollout.
  • Developer-experience as an SLI - The self-service kits are used every day by product engineers. A regression in a kit shows up as friction across the whole engineering org, so we take DX seriously as a reliability signal, not a nice-to-have.
  • Cross-team ownership - Platform Infra sits between application teams, cloud providers, and peer infra teams (Search, Network, Observability, FinOps, DBRE, Enablement). Success in this role requires investing substantial time in cross-team architecture, shared platform capabilities, and organizational alignment not just work within your own team.

Qualifications

  • Required Experience/Skills
    • Shared belief in Mercari's mission and values.
    • Senior-level engineering experience operating distributed systems in production at scale.
    • Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals - scheduler, controllers, kubelet, admission webhooks, autoscaler, network policy, workload identity - and production ownership of a managed Kubernetes environment (GKE, EKS, or AKS): cluster upgrades, incident debugging, add-on management.
    • Deep Terraform experience at scale - authoring custom modules, running blast-radius-aware migrations, refactoring shared IaC without breaking downstream consumers.
    • Strong system design and distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, replication, capacity planning, failure modes.
    • Track record of owning an infrastructure domain end-to-end: design, build, on-call, incident follow-through.
    • Professional working proficiency in English.
  • Preferred Experience/Skills
    • Go for building k8s controllers, CLIs, and internal APIs.
    • Networking fundamentals - TCP/IP, Kubernetes networking (CNI, Services, ingress, network policy), DNS, HTTP/2, mTLS - enough to reason about incidents that cross the network boundary.
    • CI/CD platform experience (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) - authoring workflows, custom actions, self-hosted runners.
    • Autoscaling / capacity-planning depth: HPA / VPA / Cluster Autoscaler internals, cost-aware autoscaling, right-sizing.
    • Experience building internal developer platforms - self-service tooling, golden paths, CLI / API ergonomics.
    • Multi-region or multi-cluster operational experience.
    • Exposure to Elasticsearch or other search infrastructure (helpful for cross-team collaboration, not required).
    • FinOps sensibility - understanding cloud spend drivers and how infra choices show up on the bill.
  • Language
    • Japanese: Not required
    • English: Business level (CEFR B2)

For details about CEFR, see here.


 

Learn More About Mercari Group

  • Careers site:
  • Mercan:
  • Social media: X / Linkedin


Recruiting at Mercari

At Mercari Group, we value empathizing with and embodying the mission and values ​​of the Group and each company. To promote the creation of an organization that maximizes the total amount of value exhibited by all members, we would like to understand the experience and skills of each candidate as accurately as possible.

Recruiting cycle at Mercari Group

  • Application screening
  • Skill assessment: For engineering positions, you will be asked to complete a skill assessment on HackerRank or GitHub. For non-engineering positions, you may be asked to complete an assessment depending on the position. (The timing of the assessment may coincide with the interview process.)
  • Interview: The number of interviews may vary depending on the position.
  • Reference check: We will ask for online references around the timing of the final interview.
  • Offer: Offers will be determined carefully in consideration of the final interview and the reference check.

 Learn more about our recruiting process here.

Equal Opportunity Hiring

Here at Mercari, we work to realize a world in which no one’s potential is limited by their background and everyone has the opportunity to freely create value. We also firmly believe that a mindset of Inclusion & Diversity is essential for us to achieve our mission.

This, of course, extends to our hiring practices as well. Mercari is committed to eliminating discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, physical disability, and other such factors so that anyone who shares our mission and values can join us, regardless of their background. For more details, please read our I&D statement.

Please read and acknowledge our Privacy Policy prior to submitting your application.

Requirements

Benefits

What this application asks

workable

First name, Last name, Email, Phone, Address, Resume, Other, Please indicate your gender (We process your gender for statistical reasons) / 性別をご選択ください。 (メルカリでは上記の情報をダイバーシティー、インクルーシビティの促進のための統計目的で調査しております。), Please read and agree to the Recruitment Privacy Policy of the Mercari Group by checking "YES". (https://careers.mercari.com/en/privacy/) / メルカリグループの採用活動におけるプライバシーポリシーをご確認の上、同意(YES)をお願いします。(https://careers.mercari.com/jp/privacy/), Do you have an employment history with Mercari Group? / 過去にメルカリグループでの勤務経験がありますか?, Have you ever directly or indirectly applyed to any positions of Mercari Group? / 過去にご自身またはエージェントを通じてメルカリ グループに応募されたことはありますか?, How did you hear about this position? / この募集をどのように知りましたか?, If your application is a referral from an employee of Mercari Group, please the employee's name. If your application is not a referral, please enter NA. / 今回の応募がメルカリグループ社員による紹介の場合、社員名を記入下さい。該当しない場合はNAとご記入下さい。, Please select your current status of residence in Japan from the list below. We will confirm if you need visa support. / 現在お持ちの日本における在留資格を下記からお選びください。ビザサポートが必要になるか確認をさせていただきます。, Mercari's values serve as the foundation of our culture and guide all of our decisions. We encourage you to review them before submitting your application. (https://careers.mercari.com/culture/) メルカリのバリューは私たちの文化の柱であり、行動指針となります。あらかじめ応募前にご確認ください。 (https://careers.mercari.com/culture/), Select the language(s) in which you would feel comfortable interviewing? / 面接時の希望言語をお知らせください。, Please select the appropriate level about your English language ability from below. Please check each criteria from our web site. https://careers.mercari.com/language/ 英語スキルについて該当するものをご選択ください。レベルの基準は採用サイトよりご確認ください。 https://careers.mercari.com/jp/language/, Please select the appropriate level about your Japanese language ability from below. Please check each criteria from our web site. (https://careers.mercari.com/language/) 日本語スキルについて該当するものをご選択ください。レベルの基準は採用サイトよりご確認ください。 (https://careers.mercari.com/jp/language/), In consideration with ensuring an appropriate assignment and wellness after joining the company, please let us know if you have any medical history related to mental health. 入社後の適正配置及び健康確保の観点からの質問です。メンタルの不調に関連した既往歴がある場合はお知らせください。 YES=ある、NO=ない, If you have chosen "YES" in the previous question, please share your current status. Please choose NA if you have answered "NO" in the previous question. 上記設問で「ある」を選択された場合、通院状況についてお知らせください。上記で「ない」を選択された場合は該当なしを選択ください。, To ensure your well-being and that any necessary accommodations are prepared after joining the company, please let us know if you have any disabilities. 入社後の適正配置及び健康確保の観点より、障がいをお持ちの場合はお知らせください。 YES=ある、NO=ない, Please feel free to share if there is anything the company should know to help ensure you can perform at your best. そのほか、良いパフォーマンスをする上で会社が知っておくべきことがある場合はお知らせください。, Please enter your websites, social media accounts, GitHub, etc. If you do not have any, please enter N/A. お持ちのウェブサイト、ソーシャルメディア、GitHubアカウント等があればご記入ください。お持ちでない場合は「なし」とご記入ください。, This position requires relocation to Japan. Is this something you are open to? Candidates already located in Japan please select "yes". このポジションは日本への転居が必要です。日本への転居は可能ですか。すでに日本在住の方は "YES"を選択してください。

  • What are your annual salary expectations in JPY?

See also