RESTAR Culture

1. International Team

Work with other English speaking engineers.

Apart from the CTO, 100% of the full-time engineers do not call Japanese their first language. We are an international engineering team with engineers from England (Adam), France (Jean and Julien), the Philippines (Jonas), the USA (Luis), and Japan (Masashi Yokota). Technical discussions are done in English as the primary language. Engineers have varying degrees of Japanese knowledge but every engineer can have an impact regardless of their Japanese level. We've created an environment and working style that allows everybody to make an impact. We have senior engineers with varying levels of Japanese language. A lack of Japanese will not block any career progression here.

2. High Quality Codebase

We have a strict code review process.

Our engineering team maintains a high bar for code quality. RESTAR manages data for enterprise real estate companies. We take this responsibility seriously and we take the necessary time to get the technical aspects right. We have a team of engineers who value high-quality code. To support a high-quality codebase, our engineers are always available to assist and discuss.

We also have a thorough code review process. Sloppy work, rushed work, or spaghetti code does not make it past the code review process.We get into the details of the implementation and the language. Your code will be reviewed by engineers active in the Elixir community (please see the "Impressive Engineers" section). The engineers are always available to discuss and assist but they do not allow sloppy work into production.

For engineers who value code quality, RESTAR is a wonderful company that makes them say, "I've finally found a team that cares about code quality as much as I do". Some engineers may think the code reviews are too strict because we get into the implementation details. For engineers, our bar for code quality can either be a source of enjoyment or frustration. We try not to make value judgments but our insistence on code quality is simply a part of the team's culture. We hope you apply with this information in mind. Our standard for code quality keeps the codebase an enjoyable place to work for all engineers while allowing us to be productive now and in the future.

3. Open Communication

We're a highly collaborative team.

RESTAR’s engineering team is highly collaborative. We discuss engineering tradeoffs and technical topics daily. We all enjoy helping each other out.Engineers discuss technical topics by screen sharing in Discord chat rooms and commenting on GitHub pull requests. Everybody is available, including the CEO and CTO.

It's as simple as messaging "can you chat?" in the discord channel.

You will also talk directly to the salespeople, product managers, and leadership to develop the rightfeatures for our clients and shape the product roadmap.

You can discuss any aspect of your work with anyone and they will most definitely have something to say about it and it will be an open discussion that if you have a better idea of course you can raise it and come to a conclusion that works best. We try to achieve the highest code quality, which is why we value the opinions of everyone. So if you want a collaborative team, I suggest you pick RESTAR.

Jonas Villanueva (Software Engineer)

4. Impressive Engineers

Work with other talented engineers

We built our backend using Elixir. Elixir is productive, simple, reliable, and offers a great developer experience. We believe we have one of the strongest Elixir teams in Japan.For example, one of our team members, Jean has been contributing to the Elixir language and ecosystem.Apart from his technical skills, he is known within RESTAR for his deep technical knowledge, mentoring capabilities, and his ability to suggest improvements to the product roadmap and technical architecture.

Another Senior Engineer, Adam, has a decade of experience in startups and at LINE.We knew of Adam before he applied to RESTAR because of his answers on StackOverflow and his activity on the Elixir Forum. He was chosen as one of the Elixir Forum Members of the Year in 2022. As a side project, he works on retirewiki, a knowledge base for those wanting to invest and retire in Japan. Apart from his technical skills, he is well known within RESTAR for excellent communication skills (succinct, direct, user-focused) and for pushing for simplicity in software design.

If you have any interest in Functional Programming, Elixir, or Frontend development, we would love to hear from you!

5. Work Life Balance

We grow sustainably.

At RESTAR, one of our core values is to pursue sustainable growth. What does sustainable growth mean for you as an engineer? It means you work for 40 hours per week but never more than 40 hours. It means, you will be evaluated on results, not hours worked. It means you are never "on-call". We believe, engineers should collaborate and focus while they work but also have time for family, hobbies, side projects, and rest. We offer 20 vacation days per year (does not depend on seniority) as well as 5 days per year for family emergencies or sick days. We created this separate class of paid time off because we believe vacation days should be used for rest instead of for emergencies and health reasons.

We established a sustainable work culture at RESTAR because our CEO worked in Japanese companies where overtime was the norm.He observed that in a culture with regular overtime work, the work could have been done in 40 hours but simply took longer because people were either too tired to do their best work or chose to take longer do their work to conform to the work culture. He did not want to recreate this system at RESTAR.We believe our sustainable work culture allows people to do their best work.

6. Psychological Safety

An environment where you're comfortable to speak up.

We create a psychologically safe environment for our team by creating a flat culture where all opinions are sought out and heard. We also solicit feedback from each engineer about our processes and technical architecture in our retrospectives. Engineers contribute discussion points during this time. Of course, engineers can also discuss topics with every team member during the week at any time.

RESTAR is the real, flattest, flat-company, hierarchy-wise. I even get to voice out my opinions to our CEO Uno san because we often go to the office together. Sometimes he consults with me on the frontend or the design of the application we have. So I'd say yes I feel that I'm contributing here just based on that and that I get to talk to anyone and give or receive their opinions about the project.

Jonas Villanueva (Software Engineer)

We listen to every team member's feedback. Engineers can even influence company-wide policy. For example, based on feedback from engineers, we’ve changed our working day to include flex time, doubled employee vacation days, and introduced new testing technologies. Your voice will beheard here!

7. Flexible Work

Work from Anywhere.

You can work fully remote from outside of Tokyo (like Adam who lives in Fukuoka) or you can come to the office every day in Shinagawa, Tokyo (like Jonas) or once a week. You can work in the best way for you.

For working hours, we have a flex time system where everyone works between 12 pm and 4 pm but the rest is up to you. You can decide when you want to work based on your family schedule or when you feel the most productive. As for a typical week, we have a daily standup at noon for 10 minutes and an all-hands meeting on Friday for HR and company-wide announcements. We have a product management meeting once a week on Thursday and an interview a week but it depends on the week. We also have a retrospective once every two weeks or as the need arises.

You can work whenever you would like outside of core hours (flex time). In the example schedule, we wrote 10-12 and 4 pm-6 pm for flex time but it is completely up to you when you use your flex time and when you want to take an hour for lunch.

8. Team Oriented

Work in a supportive environment.

We all support each other. Every engineer has their particular strengths and we have built a team culture where everyone supports each other. While some are experts in Elixir, others are more frontend oriented. You can access any member of the team by sending them a message on Discord and sharing your screen (even the CTO or CEO). We enjoy helping each other out, and it's something that we expect out of each engineer.