Senior Data Engineer (2 positions), Digital Bank, Tokyo

Location requirement

You must already be living in Japan with valid work authorization. We are not sponsoring relocation or visa transfers from overseas for this role. Applications from outside Japan will not be considered.

Japanese is used every day in this role

The team works with the business side in Japanese daily. JLPT N2 or N3 at minimum is required, or higher.

Two positions open

Hybrid: at least 2 days a week on site in Tokyo (Minato-ku), 3 or more encouraged. Permanent, full-time.

Context

Our client is building a new digital bank in Tokyo, born from a joint venture between a major Japanese fintech player and a leading banking group. The mission: build embedded financial products from the ground up, with a strong focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

About the role

As a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will build and maintain the central data hub connecting most systems inside this new bank. You will ingest data from banking systems, apply business logic, then serve it to downstream systems for management, regulatory reporting and risk. This is a senior individual contributor role: you design complex pipelines, mentor mid-level engineers and take part in architecture decisions. Small agile team of 11 engineers.

Technology stack

• Cloud: AWS (Tokyo region), S3 data lake, VPC, IAM
• Databricks lakehouse: Delta Lake, Bronze/Silver/Gold medallion architecture, Unity Catalog
• Orchestration and processing: Databricks Workflows, Apache Spark, AutoLoader
• Transformation: Delta Live Tables, SQL and Python
• Dev and DevOps: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Terraform, AI-assisted tooling

Responsibilities

• Design and implement pipelines ingesting from multiple source systems via REST APIs or database connections
• Build and maintain Bronze/Silver/Gold transformations with data quality, consistency and performance
• Implement data quality checks and cross-system reconciliation logic
• Design data models for analytics and regulatory reporting
• Build REST APIs or data serving layers for downstream consumers
• Optimize query performance (partitioning, Z-ordering, tuning)
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform, CI/CD for pipelines
• Mentor mid-level engineers and run code reviews

Requirements

• Currently based in Japan with valid work authorization, no relocation or visa sponsorship from overseas for this role
• Japanese used on the job: JLPT N2 or N3 required, or higher
• 5+ years in data engineering or analytics engineering
• Strong SQL and Python
• Hands-on pipeline building with Databricks, Spark or similar
• Cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and object storage
• Data modeling (dimensional, data vault or event-driven)
• Git and CI/CD, data governance concepts (access control, audit logging, lineage)
• Experience mentoring junior or mid-level engineers

Nice to have

Business English. Financial services or other regulated industries. Banking domain (core banking, payments, regulatory reporting). Databricks hands-on (AutoLoader, Unity Catalog, DLT). Cross-system reconciliation for financial data. Kafka or Kinesis. Terraform.

Hiring process

• Document screening or casual interview
• First interview (a technical assignment may come before it)
• Several interviews, including an online aptitude test of about 20 minutes
• Final interview, reference check possible
• Offer