Currently (26 M) working for a big Japanese company ( work involves no Japanese ) as a Cloud Engineer / SRE for the past 1.5 years in Japan itself . My work majorly involves handling operations and system architecture analysis . Not doing any coding as such .
My current salary is 6.5 million yen
Before my current company , was working as an Electrical Engineer for 2.5 years not involving any tech work but during this time was working on personal tech projects to be in touch with tech skills and not completely lose them .
Total YOE – 4 ( However 1.5 YOE in tech/IT )
Total Years in Japan – 4
Education – Engineer / Bachelors In Technology + recently got AWS certified + preparing for Kubernetes exam
Japanese Level – Daily Conversational ( Can speak and understand 60% )
Currently looking for a company which would pay anywhere around 10 M yen in the same kind of role as SRE/ DevOps/ Cloud Engineer .
Any suggestions regarding what kind of companies should I target to get 10 M salary and not requiring much Japanese . Also any good recruiting agencies which I can reach out to ?
14 comments
I think your experience is a little lacking to get interviews with the well-paying companies. Also, I think you’d be more marketable after you get your k8s cert and getting some system programming (go and/or java) under your belt. I think slogging at your current job, while working toward getting a better position, would be your easiest path. Of course please take this with a grain of salt; you might find the perfect role at 10M+ right now. Couldn’t hurt to do some interviewing. Also, having a good LinkedIn profile seems to draw a bunch of recruiters. Good luck!
If you’re going to put your Japanese level on something like this, get a certificate of some kind. “60%” is incredibly vague, and Japan loves test scores. The JLPT is the most popular, but the BJT will do in a pinch.
May I ask how you transitioned into tech from unrelated experience? Did you build a portfolio to show them or through certifications or tests?
10million is the 役員 level of wages for small to medium companies and 部長・課長 upwards for bigger companies. Which means if you want 10 million a year, you’ll have to transit to management unless you get a juicy position at FAANG
You can do it in 2 jumps.
It’s not easy to get a 50% salary bump when shifting jobs, unless very lucky or really know how to sell yourself. Thus, plan for 20% bump now and another 20% a year and a bit later.
Check “paidy”, PayPal subsidiary with offices in Tokyo.
Check tokyodev or japan-dev, similar working environments to you would offer that salary for an SRE. You may need to brush up on coding for any interviews
Did you work on company R?
10M+ is not unusual for larger Japanese companies, and very common for foreign MNCs. For Japanese companies it’s a tough sell if you don’t speak Japanese though (being able to at least interview in Japanese).
I also joined a “big westernized Japanese company” as a fresh grad a few years back with similar salary, and less than 2 years later had 10M offers from relatively smaller (but still pretty westernized) Japanese companies. These mostly came from recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn, and they found me the right roles after I told them I won’t consider anything below 10M. Smaller companies are usually easily impressed if you’ve worked at big name Japanese companies.
That said, my role is quite specialized and not that easy to find good candidates for so there was a bit more bargaining leverage on my end, your mileage may vary.
Ideas/tips that might help you….
Make sure you have a Linked In profile with good write up of your skills and experience and potential, and use the job search function there to find roles as it’s the most friendly for jobs that will take foreigners.
Target specific types of jobs and make sure your CV and LinkedIn profile shows the relevant experience that makes you suitable for those jobs. Employers and agents like a clear CV/profile where they can think “that person can do X job”, and if you don’t make that message clear then you’ll be overlooked. Suggest writing an intro paragraph to top of a CV and tailoring that for every job you apply for which highlights why you’d be suitable.
Get a generic CV to agencies like Hays. Use LinkedIn search to see which agencies place people in the roles you want and contact them – connect with them on linked in and then message them when they accept. Agencies get money if they place you so they will be motivated and they can also give advice on your CV.
Look also for Hakken agencies – agencies that send staff to other countries as they can be more lenient in requirements esp when they have to find people ASAP to send to a company
Push your cloud architecting skills – there are lots of programmers but less with those skills. However if you don’t have practical experience then it’s hard. Cloud security is another hot area.
If you don’t have demonstratable experience the write a personal project utilising your cloud skills / programming skills / arch skills. Keep it simple. An Android/iOS app or website would be a good example because ppl can access it – can be something simple like utilizing a social media API and using an AI library to summarise a post, or upload a file to an S3 bucket and have it trigger a lambda function with a simple result, such as an AI summary. If worried about cloud running cost, put username/password access on it to limit public use. There are frameworks that let you write apps in HTML/JS and so basically it’s mostly relying on cloud stuff. Cheap hosting is also readily available.
Consider project management. It can pay more these days. Realistically for your programming, cloud knowledge etc you are also up against oversees engineers who can easily and cheaply come to Japan, and outsourcing to other countries. As someone else mentioned, a 2 stage increase is more feasible but be careful not to make the employer know they are a stepping stone.
Do JLPT. Getting N2 works wonders as it’s the base for getting a job that needs Japanese, but if that’s hard (1000kanji) then N3 is a good stepping stone.
Try Rakuten as they are always looking for cloud and engineers. But you may already be working for them. If you can show examples of your skills then even better.
Edit: look for trade floor support roles at banks. If you can demonstrate conversational Japanese language skill and with the tech skill you have and having done support at another role, you could probably get a role there without having banking knowledge. Won’t advance you as an architect tho.
Feel free to ping me on chat direct if you want to discuss anything more
Hope that helps. Good luck
If you want 10M+ then a foreign owned company is the way to go. Japanes owned company, regardless if it’s “werternized” tend to pay less.
A 10M or more salary in a Japanese company are mostly the managerial position and above so it’s either be a manager (not team leader) or change to a foreign owned company.
It is quite unlikely that you’ll be able to get a 10M+ salary with 2-3 years of experience.
For instance, Qiita, a service that is popular among Japanese developers to record and share knowledge, did [a survey](https://cdn.qiita.com/assets/public/white_papers/2022-2960adf3d5e9e0c815f226960952162b.pdf) where none of their respondents with 1-2 years of experience earned ¥10M+, and only 2% of their respondents with 3-4 years of experience did. For respondents with 10+ years of experience, 11% of respondents earned ¥10M.
Now the typical Japanese developer is earning less than the typical international one, which is why I’m conducting [an annual survey](https://www.tokyodev.com/insights/2022-developer-survey) of international software developers in Japan. While 42% of our respondents made ¥10 million or over, respondents had a median of 7 years of professional software development experience. For respondents with 2-3 years of experience, the 75 percentile salary was ¥7.5M, and for 4-5 years of experience, it was ¥9.5M.
Furthermore, this survey was conducted in October 2022, just before the big downturn in tech. As the high compensation international devs were getting was driven by high paying companies like Indeed that have still frozen most hiring, I expect the numbers this year to go down, and would think for a new job seeker it is going to be even more challenging to get that salary.
Tbh, 10M is an interesting number because I have a feeling it varies between Japanese companies and US companies in Japan. I work at a US tech company, and so does my whole circle of friends in Tokyo, so I can only speak about US companies.
Entry level software engineers will get ~15M. 3-5 yoe (e.g. senior engineer) pays ~20M – 30M. Senior+ to Staff level pays 25M – 40M. Staff+ pays 45M+. This is base salary + bonus + stocks. The pay ranges are very wide, and they also overlap at different levels. Because there are 6yoe senior engineers, and also 15yoe senior engineers. Even . That’s why I said 10M is an interesting number, because as long as you can get an entry level in one of the US companies, you already make 10M+. But that means you need to find an actual software engineering role (support/system/operations/sale engineers are usually not paying as much), and it should be one of the US tech companies.
I know many people will downvote me because this sounds like bs. So take my information with a grain of salt, but I’m telling you what it is.
I have around 10 years of experience, AWS certs, and a bunch of other things, including project management and experience building things from absolutely nothing to getting investors on board to pour money into a tech company. N2 passed and the recruiters think I have N1 (failed by around 20 points) when talking with me. One of the recruiters I was speaking with groaned a bit when I mentioned a minimum of 8M. I’d say your only choice is very very big companies, for which you’ll need to fill your mind with interesting problems like how many piano tuners live in Hokkaido.
Now, this is also up to the specific skill. If you happen to align with the exact thing they are looking for you’ll have an easier time.