Engineering Manager – Global Team / Cybersecurity (#289)

Company Overview

Founded in 2011, this Tokyo-based cybersecurity company specializes in AI-driven digital advertising fraud detection and prevention. Through its flagship platform, the company helps more than 600 businesses identify invalid traffic, fraudulent clicks, and fake leads to improve advertising performance and ROI.

Rebranded in 2020 as a Marketing Security Platform, the company provides solutions addressing ad fraud and affiliate fraud, while expanding its focus to emerging security threats driven by AI.

 

Ideal Candidate Profile

This role is well suited to a proactive leader who takes ownership of outcomes, makes informed decisions, and helps team members grow through clear expectations and constructive feedback.

The ideal candidate:

• Takes initiative and ownership rather than waiting for step-by-step instructions, and approaches problems with potential solutions.
• Thrives in a fast-paced environment where open, direct feedback is encouraged and viewed as an opportunity for growth.
• Values performance and measurable results, and is comfortable with quarterly, outcome-based performance reviews.
• Adapts calmly to changing priorities and maintains clear, effective communication across teams.

 

Key Responsibilities

1. People Development

• Take ownership of the performance and professional growth of direct reports by setting clear expectations, providing continuous feedback, and implementing structured development plans.
• Conduct weekly one-on-one meetings to discuss goals, challenges, feedback, career development, motivation, and any concerns.
• Maintain an up-to-date Role & Responsibilities (R&R) document for each direct report, using it as the foundation for goal setting, performance reviews, and development planning. Review progress during each evaluation cycle and revisit development plans quarterly.
• Conduct fair, specific, and evidence-based performance reviews. Gather feedback from relevant colleagues, including Tech Leads and Maintainers, and align assessments with the Director of Engineering and other engineering leaders.
• Oversee onboarding for new team members, including structured onboarding plans, appropriate initial assignments, buddy support, and probationary reviews at one, two, and three months.

2. Performance Management and Team Leadership

• Build a team culture centered on ownership, accountability, and increasing autonomy in execution and decision-making.
• Identify performance gaps early, provide specific feedback, agree on improvement actions, and follow up on progress. When coaching does not lead to sufficient improvement within an evaluation cycle, make timely decisions in consultation with the Director of Engineering.
• Monitor workload, well-being, and motivation, addressing concerns early and adjusting responsibilities and expectations in consideration of both individual circumstances and project requirements.
• Delegate ownership effectively and ensure commitments are followed through. Use retrospectives and postmortems to drive continuous improvement in team processes and ways of working.
• Recognize individual contributions, encourage continuous learning and shared ownership, and foster trust and inclusion across teams in Tokyo, Lisbon, and remote locations.

3. Delivery Accountability and Decision-Making

• Help team members set realistic commitments and deliver on them. Ensure goals, progress, and risks are communicated proactively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, raising emerging concerns early and presenting potential solutions even when the situation remains uncertain.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Infrastructure and Operations, Tech Leads, and other Engineering Managers to align priorities, team capacity, and individual goals. Resolve cross-team blockers and coordinate handovers and coverage during leave.
• Develop a strong understanding of the product, customer challenges, and existing engineering practices to contribute to prioritization and planning discussions and support their implementation within the team.
• Provide leadership with insights into team capabilities, individual development, capacity, and risks, and support agreed decisions through execution.
• Ensure the team follows engineering standards established by Tech Leads and Maintainers, covering pull request quality, testing, code reviews, risk assessment, and deployment planning. Maintain a balanced focus on both delivery speed and engineering quality.
• Oversee incident management within the team’s scope. Ensure all incidents are documented regardless of impact and treated as the highest priority. Lead blameless postmortems focused on identifying where issues could have been detected earlier, and track corrective actions through to completion. Technical root cause analysis and remediation are handled by Tech Leads and the Maintainers group.

4. AI-First Ways of Working

• Integrate AI tools into management practices from the outset, including preparing for one-on-ones, gathering performance review evidence, monitoring delivery progress, and drafting plans and assessments.
• Embed AI into the team’s daily engineering workflows and determine how work can be effectively distributed between team members and AI agents. Translate individual productivity gains into improvements across the team.
• Implement at least one AI- or automation-driven improvement to the team’s ways of working each quarter, with measurable impact on delivery speed, quality, or predictability.

 

Management Philosophy and Team Culture

The company believes that effective managers thrive when given meaningful ownership and clear expectations.

Managers are expected to listen actively, provide timely and constructive feedback, make pragmatic decisions, and continuously improve both individual performance and team processes. Retrospectives and incidents are treated as opportunities for learning rather than blame, and a willingness to learn through hands-on leadership experience and reflection is highly valued.

The working environment emphasizes trust, accountability, clarity, and meaningful impact over rigid adherence to processes.

Definition of Done

The company expects managers to go beyond facilitating regular meetings and performance reviews. Successful delivery is measured through three stages:

Released → Validated → Adopted

Managers are responsible for ensuring that their team members take ownership of their work throughout all three stages, while making gaps and missed expectations visible and addressing them proactively.

This role is best suited to leaders who measure their effectiveness by their team’s actual delivery and professional growth, rather than by the completion of management routines alone.

Performance Evaluation and Expectations

The company conducts quarterly, outcome-based performance reviews.

Each engineer at Spider AF has an annual Role & Responsibilities (R&R) document outlining the role, core responsibilities, annual goals and KPIs, and expectations for the following year. This document serves as the foundation for quarterly performance evaluations.

The Engineering Manager will be responsible for maintaining the R&R documents of direct reports and managing their development against agreed expectations. The manager’s own R&R will be established in collaboration with the Director of Engineering during the first few weeks and will serve as the primary basis for evaluating performance in this role.

Expectations evolve over time, with each year’s R&R building on the previous year’s achievements and development for both the manager and their team members.

 

Requirements

• Experience in a technical role in software product development, such as software engineer, QA or test engineer, sales or solutions engineer, or product owner, plus at least two years in a leading role, formal or not, where you were responsible for a team’s work and for the people doing it: for example tech lead, team lead, delivery or project lead, or a role with direct reports. A formal manager title is not required, but mentoring alone is not enough.
• Able to read a pull request, follow an architecture discussion, and judge whether a plan is realistic.
• Experience taking ownership of engineering work from start to finish, including how you dealt with setbacks along the way.
• Decision-making: you have made calls on people, scope, or priorities with incomplete information, can explain how you weighed them, and owned the result. We will ask for specific examples.
• A clear motivation to develop others, and experience collaborating with product and other functions to plan work and resolve blockers.
• Willingness to adopt AI tools in your management practice from day one. Prior experience with them is a plus, not a prerequisite.
• Strong written communication and professional proficiency in English, in an async-first, multi-timezone team.
• Based in Tokyo or willing to relocate. Regular presence in our Tokyo office, with the engineers you support, is preferred.
• Business-level Japanese proficiency (JLPT N2 or higher) is required.

Preferred Experiences

• Engineering or leadership experience in a SaaS or product company.
• Experience in the ad tech, ad fraud prevention, or cybersecurity industry.
• Experience in a distributed team spanning Japan and Europe.
• Familiarity with Elixir, Phoenix, or functional programming.
• Experience running 1:1s, performance reviews, or onboarding for the people you led, or working within structured review and growth-path systems.

 

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: JPY 10,000,000 – 12,000,000 per year

The salary mentioned above includes incentives (bonuses).
– Annual salary increase
– Bonus twice a year

Probation Period: 3 months

Work arrangement

-Flextime System (Core time: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM)
-Remote work available up to 3 days per week
– Fully two days off per week (Saturday, Sunday, and National Holidays)
– Vacation Leave (3 consecutive days in addition to standard annual paid leave)
– Year-end and New Year Holidays
– Annual Paid Leave
– Condolence and Celebration Leave
– Childcare Leave
– Initial Enrollment Leave (2 days of leave to cover sudden illness, etc., available until statutory paid leave is granted after 6 months)
– Vaccination Leave

Benefits

– Stock Options
– Mobile Communication Allowance
– Flu Vaccination
– English/ Japanese lesson
– Babysitter Subsidy: 50% reimbursement up to ¥20,000/month
– Team Dinner
– Gym fee support

 

Allowances

– Commuting Allowance: Up to ¥30,000 per month
OR
– Housing Allowance: 40% of rent (up to ¥50,000 per month). Please note: Commuting allowance will not be provided if housing allowance is selected.

Example: If your rent is ¥100,000, you receive ¥40,000. If your rent is ¥150,000, you receive the maximum of ¥50,000.

Social Insurance: Fully covered
Measures Against Secondhand Smoke: No Smoking Indoors

 

Hiring Process

• Number of interviews: 2–4 rounds

• Application documents required: CV

• Interview language: English/Japanese