Backend Engineer As a Staff or Principal Backend Engineer at Zeals, you won’t just write code — you will own systems end-to-end, shape our architectural strategy, and influence technical direction across teams. You will be a key technical leader in our backend domain, responsible for designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems that power mission-critical services and accelerate the impact of our conversational commerce platform. This role is not about following roadmaps — it's about creating them. You’ll work across teams to raise the engineering bar, mentor senior engineers, and drive strategic decisions that shape our product and infrastructure for years to come. What You’ll Do
Drive architecture and design of complex, distributed backend systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance
Lead initiatives to modernize legacy systems and migrate to robust, decoupled services using Golang, gRPC, and REST
Own high-stakes technical decisions, balancing trade-offs and setting standards for software design across teams
Ensure best practices in clean code, DDD, testing, observability, and documentation are deeply embedded in the development lifecycle
Collaborate with engineering leadership, product managers, and stakeholders to align backend capabilities with business priorities
Foster a culture of technical excellence through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem solving
When required, participate in the on-call rotation and act as a technical escalation point for critical incidents
What You Bring 8+ years of experience in backend engineering with deep expertise in system design,
architecture, and large-scale production systems Advanced knowledge of Golang (preferred), with professional experience in building and
maintaining scalable APIs and services Strong track record in technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and driving cross-team
architectural efforts Fluency in Clean Architecture, DDD, and modern software engineering principles Strong grasp of observability, performance profiling, and production debugging using metrics and
tracing Confidence to challenge assumptions, push for clarity, and advocate for best practices
Bonus Points
Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure (preferably GCP) Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., CircleCI) and engineering operations tooling (e.g., Jira) Experience working with polyglot environments (e.g., Python, Ruby, Node.js) Japanese language proficiency is a plus, but not required
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! Our Tech Stack
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're obsessed with bringing hospitality to everyone – whether it's our customers or you! You’re an individual with unique needs, and while we may not have ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars to offer, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers you’ll be proud to brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out! As an employer, we're ready to roll up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means making your experience better.
Salary Range : competitive Performance review: twice a year Holidays: 10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and
winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave days per year. Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates. Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work from overseas Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office) Club activity allowance Team building allowance and Lunch allowance Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party)