Engineering Manager

Role: Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering Team Mode Of Work: Hybrid Mode of work Job Type: Full time Job Location: Vaishnavi Tech Park,Sarjapur Main Rd, Bellandur, Bengaluru, Karnataka - , India Careers Page Link for this role: Position Overview: About Platform Team: The Platform Engineering organization builds and scales infrastructure, developer tooling, and foundational services for Mercari Group globally. Our goal is to empower engineers across Japan, the U.S., and India to deliver reliable, secure, and innovative products at speed and scale. Within the platform domain, teams specialize in Developer Experience, CI/CD, Infrastructure, Observability, and Networking. As an Engineering Manager, you will provide technical leadership while driving people and organizational growth for Mercari India’s platform group. Open Role: We are seeking an Engineering Manager (Platform) who will lead and grow teams responsible for Mercari’s core platform systems. The role goes beyond technical expertise — it requires a leader who can hire, mentor, and inspire engineers, partner with global counterparts, and set a strong vision for platform engineering in India. A key aspect of this role is to define and articulate a compelling vision for platform engineering within Mercari India, driving strategic growth and technological advancement. This is a high-impact role where you will balance strategic direction, people leadership, and hands-on guidance to ensure our platform teams scale effectively. Your contributions will be central to Mercari's continued success and innovation in the e-commerce landscape. Work Responsibilities What you will do People Leadership & Growth Build, hire, and retain world-class platform engineering talent in India. Foster a culture of collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement. Provide mentorship, career development, and performance feedback for engineers and leads. Delegate effectively to promote team member growth and foster a blameless, high-trust culture that welcomes bold challenges. Technical Strategy & Delivery Partner with global engineering managers and architects to define platform vision and roadmap. Drive initiatives in areas such as Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and network infrastructure. Ensure high standards of reliability, security, scalability, and cost-efficiency across systems. Explore and champion the integration of modern platform capabilities, including AI-driven operations (AIOps) and intelligent developer tooling, to enhance productivity and system reliability. Operational Excellence Balance innovation with stability by applying SRE and DevOps principles. Enable self-service capabilities and automation to reduce toil for developers. Champion engineering best practices across teams and functions. Optimize development processes and unblock the team to increase development speed, supporting swift and efficient technical decision-making. Cross-Functional Leadership Collaborate closely with product engineering, SRE, and security teams. Align team priorities with Mercari’s global business objectives. Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You may be fit if you Are excited to define platform strategy while staying close to technical problem-solving. Believe in developer productivity, automation, and pragmatic decision-making. Are passionate about people leadership and building high-performing engineering teams. Have experience hiring, mentoring, and growing engineers in diverse and global environments. Thrive in cross-cultural, distributed teams with clear communication and empathy. Platform Engineering Challenges Since the platform and its toolings are used not only by the Japan marketplace but also by Japan fintech and Mercari US marketplace, the changes and improvements can affect the whole organization’s performance from development agility to system reliability. As the leader of this team, your guidance and strategic direction can have a truly significant impact. Your team needs to understand what the developers are struggling with and what is required for the Mercari Group’s product development. With this empathy and collection of requirements, the team prioritizes the problems to solve and decides the solution for them. You can join this decision-making process and propose a pragmatic solution leveraging your knowledge and experience. Minimum Requirements 5+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or distributed systems, with at least 3+ years in a leadership/People management role. Proven experience building and leading high-performing engineering teams, including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and fostering a culture of ownership and collaboration. A clear understanding of Platform Engineering. Strong background in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container technologies (Kubernetes, Docker). Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, etc.) and automation practices using any programming language. Experience designing scalable, secure, and highly available systems that serve as foundational platforms for application teams. Ability to work closely with cross-functional partners (Product, Security, SRE, and other Platform teams) to define roadmaps, priorities, and success metrics. Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts into clear business value. Preferred Requirements Experience scaling engineering teams in high-growth, global tech companies. Strong understanding of SRE principles, developer experience, and CI/CD ecosystems. Hands-on experience with service mesh (e.g., Istio, Kong, Linkerd) and observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, etc.). Prior open-source contributions or experience engaging with the developer community. Experience managing multi-region or hybrid cloud infrastructure. About Mercari: Mercari is Japan's biggest C2C marketplace founded in 2013 with the mission to “create value in a global marketplace where anyone can buy & sell”. From being the first tech unicorn from Japan before its IPO in 2018 we have come a long way towards becoming a global player and continuously and diligently work towards our transformation journey with a strong focus on our mission. Since its inception, Mercari Group has worked to grow its services, investing in both our people and technology. Over time Mercari has expanded from being the top player in the C2C marketplace in Japan to new geographies like the U.S. We have also successfully launched new businesses such as Merpay, which is a mobile