Hybrid Engineering Manager, DBRE

at Mercari, Inc.

• Job title: Engineering Manager, DBRE
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Ansible, AWS, Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, MySQL, Postgres, Python, Terraform, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Minato City, Japan

About the role

• Engineering Manager leading the Database Reliability Engineering team at Mercari for reliable database infrastructure. Overseeing technical strategy and team mentoring in a hybrid work environment.

Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and hire a diverse team of Database Reliability Engineers; foster a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
• Define and drive the technical vision for Mercari’s database infrastructure.
• Oversee the stability of mission-critical database systems; lead incident response for high-severity database issues and drive post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Partner with FinOps to drive continuous cost optimization initiatives, such as shard consolidation and resource right-sizing, balancing performance with efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with Platform Infrastructure, SRE, Observability, and Product teams to align database capabilities with business requirements and critical user journeys.

Requirements

• Individuals who can resonate with the mission and values of the Mercari Group and each company
• Experience managing or leading an engineering team (SRE, DBRE, or Infrastructure focus preferred), including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Strong technical background in database technologies (e.g., MySQL, TiDB, PostgreSQL) and understanding of database internal architecture, performance tuning, and high availability designs.
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform, Ansible).
• Proven track record of managing incidents and driving post-mortem/root cause analysis processes.
• Excellent communication skills to effectively collaborate with stakeholders and explain complex technical risks to non-technical leadership.
• Preferred Experience/Skills
• Experience operating large-scale distributed databases (e.g., TiDB, Spanner, Vitess) in production.
• Experience with FinOps or cloud cost management strategies.
• Background in software development (Go, Python, etc.) to understand the developer experience and tooling needs.
• Experience leading major infrastructure migrations (e.g., on-prem to cloud, database engine changes).
• Knowledge of modern SRE practices, including SLO/SLI definition and error budget management.
• Japanese: Independent (CEFR - B2)
• English: Independent (CEFR - B2) Preferred