Principal Engineer, Developer Experience (DevEx)

As Money Forward continues to scale our product portfolio and engineering organization, strengthening developer productivity has become a strategic priority for the CTO Office and the broader MF Engineering group.

We are evolving our developer experience, platforms, and governance to support increasingly complex products and a growing number of engineers in Japan and Vietnam.

To accelerate this transformation, we are looking for a Principal Engineer who can take ownership of developer productivity as a company-wide capability.

You will be a key partner to the CTO, engineering leadership, and cross-functional stakeholders in defining and executing this strategy.

Technology Stack

• Web Server-side：
  • Languages / Frameworks：Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Go, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, PHP, etc.
  • Frameworks / Libraries：Spring Boot, Rails, Next.js, React, etc.
• Database：
  • RDBMS / NoSQL：MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
• Middleware：
  • Containers / Web / Others：Docker, Nginx, Kafka, etc.
• Platform：
  • Cloud / Infra：AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, on-premise environments, etc.
• Data / Analytics：
  • Data Pipeline / Analytics：Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio, etc.
• Developer Experience / Internal Platform：
  • Developer Portal / Platform：Backstage-based internal developer portal (DFP), internal AI platform, internal CI/CD platform, etc.

Tools Used

• Repository Management：
  • GitHub, GitLab (depending on team)
• CI/CD：
  • GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, Argo CD, etc.
• Development Environment：
  • Docker, Terraform, Terraform Enterprise, local development environments, VS Code and other IDEs, etc.
• Monitoring / Logging：
  • DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, etc.
• Project Management：
  • Jira, Notion, Confluence, etc.
• Communication：
  • Slack, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Meet), etc.
• Security：
  • Dependabot, Snyk, security scanning tools integrated into CI/CD, etc.

Responsibilities

You will lead developer productivity and developer experience initiatives across Money Forward Cloud and the wider group, working closely with engineering teams in Japan and Vietnam, the CISO and PRE/SRE organizations, as well as Product and management. While architecture and governance leaders own company-wide technical design, you will own how productively developers across the company work and how smoothly they can deliver high-quality software.

• Bridge the CTO, engineering leadership, and Product to surface real productivity problems, propose data-informed solutions, and align on which value areas to prioritize and invest in first.
• Make full use of DFP (our Backstage-based developer portal) and evolve it where it provides leverage-so product teams can self-serve common needs such as templates, shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, standard patterns, and golden paths-treating it as one productivity lever rather than a goal in itself.
• Define and instrument engineering productivity: select appropriate metrics (such as DORA, SPACE, or team-specific indicators), measure honestly using our productivity-data stack (Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio), and use these insights to identify friction points and demonstrate impact.
• Lead developer-experience and tooling programs end-to-end, including developer tooling, CI/CD and build-time improvements, internal documentation and templates, and especially the rollout of AI tools, agents, and workflows on our internal AI Platform-covering technical design, implementation, and adoption.
• Identify practices that work well in specific teams and scale them across the organization by codifying patterns, sharing knowledge, and driving adoption through communication, enablement, and change management.
• Partner with the CISO and PRE/SRE organizations on security and reliability initiatives that touch developer experience, ensuring secure and reliable defaults without owning those mandates directly.
• Partner with the FinOps owner to embed cost awareness into developer tooling and golden paths, helping teams make cost-effective architectural and operational choices while not owning the overall cost program yourself.
• Support the architecture and governance review process where it intersects with developer experience, ensuring that standards and guidelines are practical, discoverable, and easy for teams to adopt.
• Communicate clearly and credibly with both engineers and executives in English and Japanese, including proposals, status updates, decision records, post-implementation reviews, and success stories.

Requirements

• Hands-on software engineering experience (including at least one of the following):
  • Experience building and operating developer tools, internal platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and build systems.
  • Experience in SRE, infrastructure, or production engineering.
  • Experience as a Tech Lead in a product or platform team.
• Experience driving technical changes across multiple teams through influence, without a direct reporting line.
• Experience collaborating with distributed or remote teams across multiple locations.
• Proven track record of leading technical design, utilizing experimental approaches, and delivering incremental improvements in a complex, multi-team environment.
• Strong communication skills in both English and Japanese, with the ability to engage a wide range of stakeholders from executive management to frontline engineers.

Nice to haves

While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.

• Experience leading multi-team or company-wide initiatives related to Developer Productivity (DevProd/DevEx) or Platform Engineering.
• Experience designing and operating internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage) and internal platforms (including providing golden paths, templates, and shared services).
• Practical experience with productivity frameworks (e.g., DORA or SPACE) and designing/tracking meaningful metrics.
• Experience collecting, transforming, and visualizing engineering data using data pipelines and analytics infrastructure (e.g., Apache DevLake, BigQuery, Looker Studio).
• Experience collaborating with security, reliability, and operations teams to embed best practices into the development process.
• Management or Tech Lead experience in a large-scale, multilingual organization spanning Japan and overseas (e.g., Vietnam).
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools or driving the organizational adoption of AI workflows.
• Knowledge of FinOps and cloud cost optimization.
• Experience driving company-wide rollouts and organizational change.
• Contributions to the tech community (e.g., OSS, tech blogs, speaking at conferences).
• Experience in AI development and/or experience in using AI tools to improve development processes.

  t- Money Forward is at a major turning point, shifting “from Cloud to AI.” We are currently driving “AX (AI Transformation)”-the next step beyond DX-with the goal of providing “Digital Workers,” where AI agents autonomously execute tasks. As we enter a phase of evolving into Japan’s No. 1 back-office AI company by integrating AI agents into all of our products in the future, we are looking for individuals who can contribute to AI-driven development and value creation.