Principal Engineer – Developer Productivity

Key Responsibilities

• Act as a bridge between the CTO, engineering leadership, and product teams by identifying developer productivity challenges, proposing data-driven solutions, and building alignment on investment priorities.
• Maximize and evolve DFP, Money Forward's internal developer portal based on Backstage, enabling product teams to self-serve templates, common libraries, CI/CD pipelines, standard patterns, and golden paths.
• Select and operate meaningful developer productivity metrics, including frameworks such as DORA and SPACE, and use productivity data platforms such as Apache DevLake, BigQuery, and Looker Studio to identify friction and validate the impact of initiatives.
• Lead developer experience and tooling programs end-to-end, from concept and design through implementation and rollout, including golden paths, developer tools, CI/CD and build-time improvements, internal documentation and templates, and AI tools, agents, and workflows.
• Identify successful practices within individual teams, standardize and scale them across the company, and drive adoption through knowledge sharing and organizational enablement.
• Partner with the CISO and PRE/SRE organizations on areas where security and reliability intersect with developer experience. Final ownership of security and reliability remains with the respective organizations.
• Collaborate with FinOps owners to embed cost awareness naturally into developer tools and golden paths. Overall ownership of cost optimization programs is outside the scope of this role.
• Support architecture and governance review processes where they intersect with developer experience, ensuring standards and guidelines are practical and easy for engineering teams to adopt.
• Communicate proposals, progress, decisions, retrospectives, and outcomes clearly and persuasively in both Japanese and English to engineers and executives.

Expected Role

• Lead through technical expertise, empathy, and communication rather than relying on formal authority.
• Own problem domains rather than individual services, including problem structuring, stakeholder alignment, and cross-team initiative execution.
• Define a vision for developer productivity, translate it into a roadmap, measure outcomes, and communicate impact.
• Improve organizational capability through mentoring and coaching of engineers and technical leaders.

Required Skills & Experience

• Hands-on professional software engineering experience, including at least one of the following:
• Experience building or operating developer tools, internal platforms, CI/CD systems, or build systems.
• Experience in SRE, infrastructure, or production engineering.
• Technical leadership experience within a product or platform engineering team.
• Experience driving technical change through influence across multiple teams without direct reporting lines.
• Experience collaborating with teams across multiple locations and/or remote environments.
• Proven experience leading technical design, experimentation, and incremental delivery in complex multi-team environments.
• Strong communication skills with stakeholders ranging from executives to engineers, in both Japanese and English.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading cross-team or company-wide initiatives in developer productivity, DevProd, DevEx, or platform engineering.
• Experience designing and operating internal developer portals or platforms such as Backstage, including golden paths, templates, and shared services.
• Practical experience with DORA, SPACE, or other productivity frameworks and designing meaningful engineering metrics.
• Experience collecting, transforming, visualizing, and analyzing engineering data using platforms such as Apache DevLake, BigQuery, or Looker Studio.
• Experience partnering with security, reliability, and operations teams to embed best practices into development workflows.
• Management or technical leadership experience in large-scale, multilingual organizations across Japan and overseas, including Vietnam.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools or introducing AI workflows at an organizational level.
• Knowledge of FinOps and cloud cost optimization.
• Experience driving company-wide rollout and organizational transformation.
• Contributions to technical communities through open source, technical blogs, conference talks, or similar activities.
• AI development experience or experience using AI tools for software development.

Language Requirements

Japanese: Business level / fluent. Ability to participate in technical and non-technical discussions, lead meetings, and create documentation in Japanese.

English: Business level / fluent. Ability to collaborate with global members, lead discussions, and create technical documentation in English.