Software Engineer, Site Reliability (Tokyo – Visa & Relocation Provided)

Mercari is Japan's first unicorn startup and the country's most widely used peer-to-peer marketplace. The group spans Mercari, Merpay (fintech) and Mercoin (crypto), and it is one of the most established routes into Japanese tech for international engineers.

Why this one matters for anyone considering Japan

Mercari runs a genuine, well-documented relocation programme rather than an informal willingness to sponsor. Their own careers site states the package covers obtaining your visa, shipping your belongings, booking your flight, and finding somewhere to live, with details confirmed at the offer stage.

Two further points stand out. The package extends to partners and dependents aged 18 or under. And Mercari explicitly states it does its best to provide visa support for those in same-sex marriages and de-facto relationships, asking candidates to raise it early so it can be accommodated. That is unusually clear for Japan, where such recognition is not guaranteed.

Onboarding for new joiners runs in English, and Mercari's engineering onboarding includes DevDojo, an in-house technical training programme.

The role

The SRE team drives reliability, scalability and operational excellence across Mercari Group's production services, spanning the Marketplace and the Fintech businesses.

The work involves making customer experience observable through CUJ SLOs and converting that into service improvements, working across Google Cloud and Kubernetes, strengthening incident response, reducing toil and building resilient systems.

There is an explicit AI dimension: as AI accelerates development velocity, the team is building guardrails and autonomous operations, and the listing describes helping shape the SRE culture that emerges as engineers and autonomous agents share the work.

What the work involves

• Strengthening reliability governance through engineering, including risk assessment, audit response and compliance-as-code
• Driving reliability across a broad business portfolio at Mercari scale, using CUJ SLOs to ground product decisions and operational policy in real user impact
• Working at the frontline of AI-driven development velocity and the operational rigour it demands
• Partnering with engineering teams that own reliability and act on data, so improvements compound across the company
• Balancing roughly 50% reactive work — alerts, on-support tickets, operations — against proactive engineering

Working conditions

• Employment status: full-time
• Work hours: full flextime, with no core time and no flexible time band
• Office: Roppongi, Tokyo
• Mercari operates a work style policy called "Your Choice," under which members choose between office and fully remote working, with exceptions for certain kinds of work
• Probationary period: first three months, on the same contract conditions as a permanent employee

Honest caveats

This is a Tokyo-based role, not a remote-from-anywhere one. It is filed here as visa-sponsored rather than remote for that reason. The relocation package is what makes it relevant: it is a route into living and working in Japan, not a job you do from elsewhere.

Mercari's "Your Choice" policy does allow fully remote working for many roles once you are employed in Japan, but the office is listed as Roppongi and SRE work carries on-support responsibilities, so confirm the specifics with the recruiter.

No salary figures are published on this listing. Japanese language ability is not stated as a requirement for this position, and Mercari is one of the English-friendly employers in Tokyo, but confirm language expectations for your specific team during the process.

How to apply

Applications go through Mercari's own Workable careers system. Note that many Mercari listings carry both English and Japanese job descriptions on the same page.