Position Outline
LINE's messaging platform serves hundreds of millions of users globally, backed by distributed database systems operating at massive scale -- petabytes of data, millions of queries per second, and strict reliability targets.The Senior Distributed Database DevOps Engineer leads the administration, operations, reliability, and performance optimization of these large-scale distributed database systems powering the LINE Messaging Platform and LINE Developer Product Platform. You will own critical operational domains, drive automation and tooling strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure we meet aggressive reliability targets across a high-traffic, multi-datacenter infrastructure.
Organization's Mission and Goals
- Join the team as a senior technical pillar: take ownership of critical database domains and lead projects from design through execution with minimal supervision.
- Raise the team's operational maturity by establishing best practices, automations, runbooks, and processes that make the team more autonomous and efficient.
- Act as a force multiplier: mentor and grow junior and mid-career engineers so they can take on increasing responsibility.
- Drive cross-team collaboration with SRE, DBRE, and development teams to improve the reliability and performance of our storage infrastructure.
- Contribute to the team's technical direction and roadmap through architecture proposals and reviews.
Responsibilities
The Distributed Database DevOps Engineer focuses on administrating, operating and troubleshooting distributed databases under high volume of data and traffic while ensuring high reliability goals.
Specifically, the following tasks are expected:
- Lead the deployment, upgrade, scaling, data migration, and capacity planning of distributed database systems across multiple datacenters.
- Design and implement automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and operational tools to reduce toil and improve deployment reliability.
- Lead on-call operations, monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident response for complex database failures.
- Drive root cause analysis, post-mortems, and systemic remediation to prevent recurrence.
- Define and refine SLOs and SLIs with SRE and DBRE teams, and improve monitoring, alerting, and observability.
- Lead performance tuning and cost optimization across the database fleet.
- Plan and execute high-impact operational changes, including major version upgrades, data migrations, and failover exercises.
- Work with development, Customer Service, QA, and other teams to improve database usage patterns and system resilience.
*Scope of Change: There is a possibility of reassignment to any duties as determined by the company.
Learn About the Product
- LINE Messaging Platform
- LINE Developer Product Platform
Ideal Candidate
- Those who seek to improve the flow of operations and optimize cost and performance.
- Those who can design solutions that address both current and future problems and work to provide solutions that enhance the overall operations of an organization.
- Those who have deep knowledge and experience operating, solving and improving hardware and software problems that occur in large infrastructures and services that handle high amount of traffic.
- Those who properly evaluate the root cause of the issue and works to create an effective solution.
- Those who have the ability to describe their suggestions, observations and results accurately so the rest of the team understand and follow the procedures.
- Those who contribute together with SRE/DBRE to achieve and adjust defined SLO to ensure high reliability standards through system monitoring, problem detection and immediate response.
Required Skills ＆ Experience
- 5+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure operations roles.
- Proven experience operating long term systems in production at scale. Additional points if those systems included databases or distributed systems (e.g., Cassandra, Hadoop, Kafka, Redis Cluster, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, TiDB, or similar).
- Solid Linux systems administration skills: performance analysis, storage and networking internals.
- Proficiency in automation and tooling development using languages such as Python, Go, Shell, or similar, and orchestration tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or Kubernetes.
- Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: replication, partitioning, consistency models, or failure modes.
- Experience designing and operating monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, or similar).
- Track record of leading incident response, conducting post-mortems, and driving systemic improvements.
- Experience with capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization for large-scale infrastructure.
- Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small team in a technical capacity.
- Conversation skills in Japanese (intermediate or advanced level required).
- English skills (skills for written communication and reporting to internal and external developers).
Preferred Skills ＆ Experience
- Experience operating infrastructure across multiple datacenters or regions, including DR planning and failover execution.
- SRE concepts and best practices applied at scale.
- Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and service mesh technologies.
- Experience with database internals: storage engines, compaction strategies, consensus, write-ahead logs, replication protocols.
- Experience with chaos engineering or fault injection practices.
- Experience with BCP/DR planning and execution.
- Background in project/team leadership or management.
- Contributions to open-source projects related to databases, infrastructure, or observability.
Salary
Expected annual salary: JPY 9,000,000 to JPY 13,000,000
Form of salary: Monthly salary (including fixed overtime allowance)
Standard monthly salary: JPY 400,000 to JPY 667,000
(Breakdown of standard salary)
―Base salary: JPY 309,000 to JPY 518,000
―Fixed overtime allowance: JPY 90,000 to JPY 150,000
Fixed overtime allowance of 35 hours will be provided, regardless of whether overtime work is performed.
Note 1: Overtime allowance is paid separately for overtime work in excess of the fixed 35 hours.
Note 2: Names of items related to monthly salary vary depending on the grades.
Bonuses are granted a maximum of two times a year. The amount is determined by factors including the company's and your department's performance.
Allowances
Overtime allowance, commuting allowance,*1 LY Corporation Working Style allowance,*2 etc.
*1 You will be paid for the number of days you actually came to the office. (Maximum of JPY150,000/month)
*2 Allowance to improve your remote work environment (JPY11,000/month)
Type and Period of Employment
Type of employment: permanent employee (no fixed period of employment, 3-month trial period)
*No fixed period of employment
Work Location
- Akasaka Office (Akasaka Trust Tower, 2-17-22 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
- Osaka Midosuji (Midosuji Frontier, 1-13-22 Sonezakishinchi, Kita-ku, Osaka)
- Some work may be required in the secure room. In such cases, you must be able to come to work within an hour to your office.
- We welcome applicants who live within an hour's distance from their home to the Kioicho office, as it may be necessary for them to come to the office on short notice.
*The office at which you work upon hire will be your assigned location. Thereafter, there is a possibility of reassignment to all business locations as determined by the company.
*The offices are wheelchair accessible.
*Note on measures against passive smoking: In principle, no smoking indoors (smoking rooms are available).
Work Hours
- Flextime system: standard work hours 7 hours 45 minutes (no core hours)
- Start and end times are up to the individual. However, the company's standard working hours are from 9:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m.
- Shortened working hours system available for childcare and caregiving.
*Some departments may operate on the standard work hours (9:30 a.m. - 6:15 p.m.), while others may have a shift schedule.
Holidays and Leave
*1 May differ depending on department.
*2 When a public holiday falls on a Saturday, employees will be given the previous business day off.
Benefits
Comprehensive social insurance (health insurance, nursing care insurance, welfare pension insurance, employment insurance, workers' compensation insurance), Optional Defined Contribution (DC) Pension Plan, Comprehensive Welfare Group Term Insurance, Group Long-term Disability, Employee Savings Program, Cumulative Stock Investment Program, subsidy for re-examination after regular basic/comprehensive health checkup, in-house massage room, club activities, subsidy for employee social events, and more
Talent Development/Support Systems
Training for Employees, Language Courses, Management Training, LY Corporation Job Challenge, Sabbatical Leave, Doctoral Studies Support Program, and more
Selection Process
How to Apply
Please fill out and submit the application form. To assess your eligibility for the position, we kindly ask you to provide the necessary personal information on the application form. Please note that this information will only be used for recruitment purposes. Please also note that your resume or other submitted documents will not be returned.
Document Screening
You will be notified of the results of the selection process within two weeks at the e-mail address you entered in the application form, regardless of whether your application is accepted or not. It may take about one week longer if the application period falls during the Golden Week and the New Year holidays.
Interview, aptitude test, technical test, compliance check/reference check
Applicants who pass the document screening will be required to undergo multiple interviews, aptitude/technical tests, compliance checks, and reference checks, although the details vary depending on the position.
You will be notified of the results of the selection process within two weeks at the e-mail address you entered in the application form, regardless of whether your application is accepted or not.
The schedule will vary depending on interviews and other factors, but if everything goes smoothly, an internal offer will be made within about four to six weeks after the application is submitted. Please note that we will not respond to inquiries regarding the details or criteria of the selection process or the reasons for the results, regardless of the results of your application.
Related Positions