70% of Mobingi engineering members are from outside of Japan. This time, I interviewed Chew Esmero, Chief Architect and Team Lead.

My failed attempt in establishing a career in music.

During high school, I started performing at bars as a sideline job. Eventually, I started serious performing during and after graduation in the hopes that my music career will take off. But unsurprisingly, only a handful of people finds success in the music industry. So I went back to what I actually studied in university; software programming.

Start working as engineer in the Philippines.

I studied Computer Engineering in university. My first software-related job was at a bank in the Philippines. Then I worked at a software firm that also operated as an outsourcing company mostly for Japanese firms. Shortly after I joined, I was assigned to IBM which was one of their main clients. That's how I ended up here in Japan.

Even though I changed jobs several times, I have always worked in the same field; that is, device driver programming, embedded software, low-level programming in C and x86 assembly. But lately, more and more exciting (at least for me) technologies are getting into the mainstream like cloud computing, IoT, blockchain, machine learning, those sort of stuff. So I said to myself, “if I don’t decide to join the bandwagon, I’m going to be left behind”. Since then, I've been trying to learn new technologies especially cloud computing. I thought Mobingi was a good fit since they were doing just that, and so I joined.

Work as Chief Architect and Team Lead.

I found Mobingi through Linkedin. When I started working at Mobingi, my knowledge of cloud was miniscule at best. I’ve heard of AWS, GCP, etc. though, I've never used either of them. I only really learned about cloud computing here in Mobingi. What I did for understanding cloud computing was a lot of reading, trial and error, and then more reading. Fortunately, we also have engineers in Mobingi that are really proficient in cloud concepts, so I learned a lot from them as well. Right now, I'm the company's chief architect and team lead. My main focus is about system architecture for our products, which technology to use, performance improvements, efficiency in our operational costs, that sort of thing. We strive to improve our products and infrastructure more and more as we move forward into the future.

Communicate with various members.

Our team is from multiple countries. Basically we prefer face-to-face communication, using both English and Japanese. As much as possible, we minimize traditional meetings (unless it's a big discussion) and prefer informal/casual talking. And Slack, of course.

At times, it's a little bit difficult for English speakers to communicate in Japanese especially if the topic is somewhat technical and the language command is not that good. And it's the same way with Japanese speakers towards English speakers as well, but overall, it's not really a problem or a hindrance. Most are bilingual/multilingual here. At worst, we can always ask help from multilingual speakers for quick translations.

Message for the people interested in Mobingi.

At Mobingi, we regard personality as more important than skill. Let’s say 90% personality, 10% skill. Well, not exactly that, but you get the idea. We can teach skills, but we can’t change personalities. Working with a team of smart people, especially smart people from different backgrounds and culture, there will always be conflicts and clashes.

Anyway, if you want to learn and work on some of the very latest cloud technology, you should join us here at Mobingi.

How was the interview?

This is the first time to make English interview, though actually half of the entire Mobingi employees are from outside of Japan. If you are interested in this environment, you want to join a Japanese company from outside of Japan, or you have passion to deal some of the very latest technology, please apply Mobingi!