Honnetenshoku

Overview

Japan's job market has long operated with a striking lack of transparency. Candidates accept offers with limited knowledge of real salaries, actual working hours, or management culture — and that information gap costs people years. Honnetenshoku, which roughly translates to "honest job change," was built to change that. The platform lets current and former employees share detailed, verified reviews of their workplaces, covering compensation ranges, work-life balance, management quality, and company culture. Job seekers use this data to make better decisions before ever submitting an application. I was responsible for designing and building the backend systems that make this information trustworthy, performant, and meaningful at scale.

My Role

I joined as a backend engineer and took end-to-end ownership of the API layer and data systems. I designed and implemented the RESTful APIs consumed by both the web frontend and the mobile clients, built the review ingestion and processing pipeline, and developed the analytics engine that aggregates thousands of individual employee reviews into the company-level insights that users actually read. Beyond the API work, I contributed to the Next.js frontend and was responsible for provisioning and managing the AWS infrastructure that the platform runs on.

Key Contributions

• Designed and built RESTful APIs covering review submission, company profiles, salary data, and full-text search — serving both the web application and mobile clients from a single backend
• Implemented a review aggregation engine that computes salary percentiles, rating distributions, and department-level trends from raw submission data, turning individual responses into meaningful company insights
• Built a review processing pipeline with validation rules and abuse detection to maintain data quality and trust across a growing volume of submissions
• Integrated Redis caching for high-traffic company profile pages, reducing database load and achieving consistent sub-100ms response times under peak traffic
• Built server-rendered company profile and search result pages in Next.js, improving organic search visibility and delivering faster first-paint experiences for users discovering the platform
• Provisioned and managed AWS infrastructure including EC2, RDS, and S3, and containerised the full service stack with Docker for consistent, reproducible environments across development and production

Tech Stack