Overview:
MetLife is seeking an experienced bilingual-Japanese Technical Lead to help modernize business-critical distribution applications using cloud-ready, secure, and scalable engineering practices. This opportunity is ideal for a delivery-focused full-stack technologist who can lead engineering teams, collaborate effectively with global stakeholders, and drive high-quality application development aligned with enterprise architecture, security, and operational excellence standards.
What will you do:
- Design, build, and modernize full-stack applications using approved cloud solutions and modern engineering practices.
- Work closely with application owners, business analysts, architects, and engineering teams to align with the MetLife Global Platform Reference Architecture.
- Lead and coordinate a mid-sized team of employees and/or vendor resources to deliver application features in an Agile model.
- Collaborate with global and local stakeholders, engineers, and delivery teams to support shared delivery goals.
- Drive progressive delivery, release readiness, and operational stability with a focus on reducing production incidents.
- Ensure required quality, security, and change-management practices are followed, including Veracode, SonarQube, ServiceNow, and release governance processes.
- Support documentation, delivery governance, and process artifacts required for financial institution technology delivery.
What we are looking for:
- 8+ years of experience in the IT industry, including hands-on application development and delivery leadership.
- 5+ years of experience in web or full-stack application development.
- 3+ years of experience delivering projects using Agile practices.
- Experience leading a team of 5–10 engineers or vendor team members.
- Strong experience in cloud migration, deployment automation, build automation, and release automation.
- Hands-on knowledge of microservices and modern application frameworks such as Spring Boot, Netflix OSS, Kubernetes, Docker, or equivalent platforms.
- Strong understanding of REST API design and integration patterns.
- Exposure to AI-assisted software engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot or similar developer productivity platforms.
- Mandatory Japanese language proficiency with good business conversation skills; JLPT N3 or above preferred/required based on hiring criteria.
Technical Skills:
- Full-stack application development and application deployment automation.
- Strong hands-on experience in Java development, including core Java concepts, object-oriented design, collections, concurrency, exception handling, and enterprise application development.
- Hands-on expertise with Spring Boot, Spring Framework, RESTful services, dependency injection, configuration management, security integration, and production-ready microservices development.
- Containers and orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, or equivalent.
- Cloud platforms: Azure, AWS, GCP, or equivalent enterprise cloud environments.
- CI/CD and DevOps tools: Git, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, UCD, or similar.
- Observability and monitoring tools: Splunk, AppDynamics, or equivalent.
- NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Cosmos DB, Cassandra, or similar.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Scrum knowledge and experience working in Agile delivery teams.
- Project management, stakeholder coordination, and delivery tracking skills.
- Incident management and release management exposure.
- Automated testing mindset and experience with quality engineering practices.
- Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure certification or equivalent Azure development experience.
