Tech Talks vol.28 – Frontend Engineer

About Tech Talks

In this Tech Talks series, we will share with you the attitude and vibe of the PayPay Tech Team through the voices of the unique product members from around 50 countries!
In this interview, we sat down with Byron, a frontend engineer on the Web Platform Team.

What are your team’s mission and responsibilities?

Teams at PayPay are typically linked with product lines, but the Web Platform Team, not belonging to any product line, has a more cross-functional structure.

Our team’s mission is to support the Consumer Web Team with regard to web centralization, including SRE, security, product operations, and WBFF (Web Backend for Frontend). A few simple examples include managing libraries and other resources used for coding, and change management that allows our team to perform multi Micro Frontend releases with quality as long as engineers input release schedules. Besides that, we are also responsible for maintaining core features such as the sign-in and login pages and signup.

Tons of important pages here at PayPay use WebView to enable our speedy release schedule, meaning our team plays a very extensive and important role.
Within that, I am primarily responsible for WBFF development, change management, facilitating web releases, automating web operations, and monitoring alerts and dashboards.

What made you decide to come to PayPay?

I first felt the desire to live in Japan when I was struck by the culture on my first visit about 10 years ago. As an engineer who values quality, I was very impressed by how everything runs so efficiently here―everyone follows, say, even traffic rules without a second thought. Then, after a two-month opportunity to stay in Japan for work, I decided to move my career here, landing in Tokyo at the same time I started at my previous company.

The biggest reason I switched jobs to PayPay was because I wanted to be involved in a product that I use myself. The experience of seeing our own work affect and improve the lives of so many people is a very happy one. I was using PayPay every day myself, not only for QR code payments, but also for things like PayPay Securities and Bank, bill payments, Pay Later, point investments, and so on. I also felt it was the perfect place to put my skills to use.

One more reason I joined came up in my interviews. Seeing the managers and senior managers gave me insight into the company’s standing, and the HR and recruiting staff into its future. The final deciding factor was the moment I really felt that PayPay presented a chance to grow all my skills ― not just as an engineer ― and that it’s a company that highly values its people.

What’s the biggest challenge you have faced at PayPay?

The OAuth 2.0 authorization project that I took part in about half a year after joining. It was a project aimed at improving PayPay’s security and development efficiency through unifying all our internal login systems. I was tasked with resolving a few client bugs and had a really hard time making sense of all the complex architecture to fix them in time, since I joined the project in the middle of its first phase without the slightest knowledge.

I went on to oversee the web side when changes were made to token handling in phase two. We thoroughly checked the WBFF code in advance, since any problems had the potential to break every single web feature. At the same time, we only had two days to test, and on top of that, testing during the day would have impacted the QA Team, so with our manager’s help, we tested each feature one by one in the early morning. Thanks to this, we saw good post-release results, which was quite relieving.

This project helped me understand our entire service just six months after joining, and it was a valuable experience for me to learn how to cooperate with the QA and Backend Teams.

How is your team’s vibe?

We’re all able to honestly express our opinions. And, even if a problem arises, we just address it and move on, without pointing fingers at whoever’s in charge. That’s the kind of environment our manager has fostered ― we can give our opinions easily and take real action based on them.
Besides, my teammates are self-disciplined and know exactly what they need to do. I think that’s why we’re able to achieve such a blazing speed at PayPay.

What’s important to you as an engineer?

As an engineer, quality comes first for me.
Ever since I entered the workforce, I have always wanted to make people think, “I’m in good hands if Byron is in charge.”
However, PayPay requires both quality and speed. This is not easy at times, but it’s also exactly why I can go all out here.

What do you want to try out next at PayPay?

I want to pave my career path at PayPay towards the goal of becoming an Engineering Manager. I had actually worked as an EM before joining PayPay. It is a very demanding job, but I found it deeply rewarding to help my team members grow, which in turn leads to the growth of the product and company, and to value provided to users. That is exactly what I want to do next.
To achieve this goal, I now want to deepen my understanding of not only technical aspects, but the business as well.

Finally, any words for job seekers?

PayPay offers a fully remote and flexible work style, and one big perk I experience as a frontend engineer is being able to see our app actually being used by so many users.
We have a good environment for engineers who want to challenge themselves, since the scale of the service grows day by day, and the organization itself is also changing day by day. In particular, I believe that engineers with broader perspectives, such as those who work full-stack, and who are autonomous can excel at PayPay.

*Recruitment status and employee affiliations are correct at the time of the interview.