Hi there, my name is Joseph from the U.S., and I am a full-stack engineer who has been working for Securitize Japan since August 2023.

A little bit about myself. I came to Japan in October 2019 after graduating with a bachelor’s in electrical and computer engineering and a minor in computer science in June 2019. Around that time, I knew that I wanted to spend a few years working abroad to broaden my horizons, and my primary choices were Germany, Japan, and China. But because I had university friends who were all working in the same robotics company, I ended up applying for and working at a startup robotics company in Tokyo, where I worked for about 3 years before joining Securitize Japan to learn more about the fintech blockchain industry.

Home office somewhere in Japan.

Securitize’s product is a platform that allows companies to tokenize their assets (i.e. represent asset ownership with digital blockchain tokens) and offer these tokenized assets to their client investors, allowing investors partial ownership of traditional and non-traditional assets such as stocks, real estate, art, and much more. The primary platform’s frontend/backend microservices and databases are maintained by the global Securitize team while Securitize Japan extends the primary platform with its own frontend/backend microservices and databases to comply with Japanese regulations on user data and accommodate client company needs. Pretty cool idea if you ask me.

To me, Securitize Japan is a somewhat unconventional company. Everyone is allowed to work remotely, from anywhere, which provides an incredible opportunity to experience the digital nomad lifestyle if one is so inclined, with the given caveat that one works that should work on Japan time. Although currently based in the Tokyo/Yokohama area, I’ve traveled throughout Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and would like to try working from China and the west coast of the U.S. in the near future. Team members have worked from Europe and at the time of this writing, our team lead is in Australia for the year, so it gives one a pretty good picture of how flexible the management at Securitize Japan really is.

Spent several weeks working remotely in Seoul. The place that I stayed at was only several stations away from the National Museum of Korea, so I often went there after work to relax.

Work is really flexible, with most people working 9:00-18:00, 9:30-18:30, or 10:00-19:00 (assuming a 1-hour lunch break), though I sometimes work 8:00-16:00 (skipping lunch break) if I have something that evening. Again, work-life balance is very possible at this company. Every Monday, we have our weekly developer scrum meeting 10:00-10:30, and that’s pretty much it! I have the rest of the week to focus on my tasks. While this may raise concerns about potential communication problems, our Slack channels and JIRA channels are quite active with discussions carried out in Japanese or English depending on the situation. And if something needs to be resolved quickly, then we’ll schedule short meetings with relevant team members. Finally, not everyone in the team does it, but I personally have a monthly 1-on-1 meeting with my manager to chat a bit about our personal lives, get feedback from each other, and discuss current, upcoming, and potential future projects.

Spent about a week working remotely in Taipei. This is an old street in Taipei that a friend and I discovered over the weekend.

The workflow at Securitize Japan is also really quite simple: consultants and team leads raise JIRA tickets and teammates will self-assign tickets, though our team lead will sometimes ask us to prioritize certain tasks first, and any necessary discussions related to the task is carried out on Slack or JIRA channels in Japanese or English depending on the situation. Considering that our international six-person team is composed of mid-senior level engineers and that our team lead has a hands-off management style, the general expectation is to be able to take the initiative and work independently, with teammates willing to help out if it’s within their domain of expertise.

As for my work, I am officially a full-stack engineer, so I usually work on maintaining and developing features for our TypeScript React apps, NestJS backends, and MySQL and MongoDB databases. However, the nice thing about working at Securitize Japan is that one can choose to wear multiple hats: I’ve proposed and worked on projects usually handled by test engineers, dev tooling engineers, and DevOps.

Here are some interesting projects that I’ve gotten to work on so far:

1. Test automation. I got to research and develop our current frontend testing strategy for one of React apps. Given that there were essentially no tests at the time, I decided to prioritize integrated testing (i.e. page component level testing) as it provided test coverage similar to E2E tests with the speed of unit tests and ended up integrating Storybook stories and Playwright’s test generator with a Rust mock data server. This currently allows us to quickly create tests without having to manually mock data.
2. CI/CD pipelines. Following up on my previous work with frontend integrated testing, I researched and integrated Chromatic’s visual testing tool into our Bitbucket pipelines to avoid potential unintentional UI changes or regressions.
3. Dev tooling. I’m currently working on a dev tool written in Golang that allows our engineers to develop, deploy, and test our applications onto a local Kubernetes (Minikube) cluster while supporting hot-reload, all of which is possible due to Tilt. This dev tool will allow our team to more easily develop, test, and integrate applications into AWS EKS Kubernetes clusters.

Overall, I think engineers who prioritize remote-work and work-life balance and are comfortable working independently should consider a career at Securitize. Thanks for reading and hope to see you around soon!

One of the benefits of remote work: enjoying a nice 焼肉 (yakiniku) lunch with a housemate at a share house in Yokohama.