How to Apply to SmartNews

12 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 16 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • SmartNews uses Workable as its ATS at apply.workable.com/smartnews, and that is where every verified active posting ultimately routes, regardless of how you first discover it.
  • The canonical careers entry point is careers.smartnews.com, not www.smartnews.com/en/careers, which currently returns a 404 and should be ignored.
  • The company is a Tokyo-headquartered, Shibuya-based employer with a smaller Palo Alto office, and the realistic center of opportunity is Japan. As of this guide's publication, roughly nine of ten active Workable postings are Tokyo-based and one is in Palo Alto.
  • Tokyo roles are genuinely bilingual, with English acceptable for most technology positions and Japanese required for many business, sales, and editorial positions. Honest self-assessment of Japanese proficiency is important.
  • The US business has been meaningfully scaled back since 2023, and expectations of a Silicon Valley hypergrowth opportunity are not aligned with current reality. US hiring is selective and focused.
  • Interview processes are four to five rounds with a take-home coding exercise common for engineering roles, a values-heavy final round, and a review cycle that is faster than traditional Japanese enterprises but slower than Silicon Valley startups.
  • Machine learning, recommendation systems, news understanding, backend Scala and Python, and mobile Kotlin and Swift are the largest technology hiring categories, reflecting SmartNews's core product needs.
  • Domain interest in news, media, civic technology, and information quality is a real differentiator in the final interview rounds and should be surfaced authentically if you have it.

About SmartNews

SmartNews, Inc. is a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation company best known for its flagship SmartNews app, a mobile-first news reader that uses machine learning to surface trending stories from thousands of publishers. Founded in 2012 by co-CEOs Ken Suzuki and Kaisei Hamamoto (often cited alongside early-team architect Kenji Kaneko, who built the core news clustering technology), the company grew out of a research prototype called Crowsnest that analyzed Twitter's social graph to identify the news stories people were actually talking about. That foundation in information retrieval, clustering, and real-time signal processing still defines the engineering culture today, and it is the reason SmartNews hires so heavily for machine learning, recommendation systems, and news understanding work. The company operates primarily from two offices: its headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo, which houses the majority of product, engineering, design, and business operations staff, and a smaller San Francisco Bay Area office in Palo Alto, California, which historically supported the US launch and ad sales. SmartNews employs roughly 700 people across both locations, though the US headcount has contracted significantly since 2023. The company is privately held and reached a reported $2 billion valuation after its Series F funding round in 2021, backed by investors including JIC Venture Growth Investments, ACA Investments, and SMBC Venture Capital. Combined monthly active users across Japan and the United States are estimated at around 50 million, with Japan representing the majority and a more entrenched user base. SmartNews is a genuinely bilingual workplace, which is unusual for a Japanese-headquartered tech company. English is widely used in engineering, product, and design meetings, technical documentation is typically written in English, and many senior engineers and managers are non-Japanese nationals who have relocated to Tokyo. In that sense the company is comparable to Mercari, Rakuten (after its Englishization policy), and PayPay as one of the most accessible Japan-based tech employers for international candidates. Japanese language ability is not strictly required for most technology roles, though business development, publisher partnerships, sales, editorial, and many customer-facing roles do require business-level Japanese. The company sponsors work visas for qualified international hires and has a structured relocation program for engineers moving to Tokyo. Be honest with yourself about what SmartNews is and is not today. It is not a hypergrowth Silicon Valley startup, and pretending otherwise sets candidates up for disappointment. The US market push that defined the 2018 to 2022 era, when SmartNews was one of the fastest-growing news apps in the American App Store, slowed considerably after 2023 as the company retrenched around its profitable Japan business, laid off a significant portion of the US team, and shifted resources back to Tokyo. Several high-profile US executives departed in that period. What remained after the retrenchment is a company with a durable, cash-generating home market, a still-relevant technology platform, a serious machine learning organization, and selective US hiring focused on growth marketing, ads partnerships, and strategic product roles. If you are applying from North America, the realistic opportunities are narrower than they were two years ago, and most of the interesting engineering work is in Tokyo. Product-wise, SmartNews is more than a generic news reader. The company has invested heavily in election and civics features, including a well-regarded US Election News Map during the 2020 and 2024 cycles that surfaced balanced coverage from across the political spectrum. It has also shipped AI-driven news summarization features, localized channels, weather and disaster alerts integrated with Japanese government data feeds, and publisher revenue-sharing programs that distinguish it from pure aggregators that strip-mine content without compensation. For engineers and product people interested in the intersection of machine learning, journalism, civic technology, and large-scale mobile platforms, SmartNews offers a problem space that is substantively different from working at a general-purpose social network or search company.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Start at the canonical careers site at careers

    Start at the canonical careers site at careers.smartnews.com. The URL www.smartnews.com/en/careers currently returns a 404, so ignore any search results that point there and go directly to the careers subdomain instead.

  2. 2
    Browse open roles and click through to apply

    Browse open roles and click through to apply. Every live posting routes to SmartNews's Workable-hosted board at apply.workable.com/smartnews, which as of this guide's publication lists approximately ten open positions across Tokyo Shibuya and Palo Alto.

  3. 3
    Read the job description carefully to determine whether it is a Japanese-languag

    Read the job description carefully to determine whether it is a Japanese-language role, an English-language role, or a bilingual role. Postings written partially or entirely in Japanese generally expect at least business-level Japanese, while postings written entirely in English are open to non-Japanese speakers. Mixed-title postings like 'Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation Algorithm / 機械学習エンジニア, レコメンデーションアルゴリズム' are typically bilingual-friendly, with English acceptable for the technical track.

  4. 4
    Create a Workable candidate account or apply as a guest

    Create a Workable candidate account or apply as a guest. Workable's application form asks for your name, email, phone number, current location, résumé upload, and a cover letter or answer to a free-text question. Some roles add structured screening questions about work authorization, Japanese language level, or salary expectations.

  5. 5
    Upload your résumé as a PDF

    Upload your résumé as a PDF. Workable's parser handles single-column PDFs cleanly and extracts contact details, work history, and education into structured fields. Review the parsed data after upload and correct any misparsed entries before submitting.

  6. 6
    Answer any role-specific screening questions truthfully

    Answer any role-specific screening questions truthfully. These are read by recruiters and filtered before a human reviewer opens your file. Common screeners include years of experience with a specific technology stack, Japanese proficiency on the JLPT scale, visa sponsorship needs, and earliest possible start date.

  7. 7
    Submit and watch for an acknowledgment email from Workable

    Submit and watch for an acknowledgment email from Workable. If you do not receive one within a few minutes, check your spam folder, since transactional email from Workable sometimes lands there.

  8. 8
    Expect the first recruiter screen within one to three weeks if your profile matc

    Expect the first recruiter screen within one to three weeks if your profile matches. SmartNews moves somewhat faster than traditional Japanese enterprises and somewhat slower than Silicon Valley growth-stage startups, reflecting its hybrid culture.

  9. 9
    If you do not hear back, it is acceptable to follow up once through the Workable

    If you do not hear back, it is acceptable to follow up once through the Workable portal or via a LinkedIn message to a SmartNews recruiter after three to four weeks. Do not apply to multiple roles simultaneously unless they are genuinely distinct functions; recruiters deduplicate candidates and spray-and-pray applications hurt rather than help.

  10. 10
    For senior and staff-level roles, consider a warm introduction

    For senior and staff-level roles, consider a warm introduction. SmartNews engineers and product managers are active in the Tokyo tech community, at events like Japan's PyCon, the Tokyo AI meetup scene, and the Shibuya engineering circuit, and a referral from a current employee is weighted noticeably more favorably than a cold application.

Resume Tips for SmartNews

recommended

Format for Workable's parser, which means a single-column PDF résumé with standa

Format for Workable's parser, which means a single-column PDF résumé with standard headings such as Experience, Education, and Skills. Multi-column layouts, text inside images, and heavy design elements confuse Workable's extractor and cause information to land in the wrong fields.

recommended

Submit in English unless the posting is explicitly Japanese-only

Submit in English unless the posting is explicitly Japanese-only. English résumés are the default for technology and product roles at SmartNews, and sending a rirekisho (Japanese résumé) or shokumu keirekisho (career history) is not required for English-track roles. If you are applying for a Japanese-language business role, prepare both English and Japanese versions.

recommended

Lead with measurable impact rather than job duties

Lead with measurable impact rather than job duties. SmartNews is a metrics-driven product company, and a bullet that reads 'Improved recommendation click-through rate by 18 percent on a feed serving 40 million monthly users by replacing a collaborative filtering model with a two-tower neural retrieval system' is worth a dozen bullets that describe what you were responsible for.

recommended

For machine learning and data roles, name specific models, libraries, and infras

For machine learning and data roles, name specific models, libraries, and infrastructure. TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Airflow, BigQuery, Spark, and specific model families like transformers, two-tower retrievers, and contextual bandits all act as ATS keyword anchors and as genuine signals of depth.

recommended

For backend engineering roles, emphasize Scala, Kotlin, and Python experience, s

For backend engineering roles, emphasize Scala, Kotlin, and Python experience, since these are the dominant server-side languages in SmartNews's stack. Java and Go experience translates, but leading with Scala if you have it is a strong match signal.

recommended

For iOS and Android roles, call out Swift, SwiftUI, Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and

For iOS and Android roles, call out Swift, SwiftUI, Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and experience with large legacy codebases that have been progressively modernized. SmartNews ships one of the larger Japanese-market news apps, and engineers who have worked on apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and a decade of history are a better cultural fit than candidates whose experience is exclusively greenfield.

recommended

Mention news, media, publishing, journalism, civic technology, or search and rec

Mention news, media, publishing, journalism, civic technology, or search and recommendation domains prominently if you have that background. Domain experience is genuinely valued here in a way it is not at generic product companies, and prior work at Google News, Apple News, Flipboard, Yahoo Japan, LINE News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, NHK, or any publisher platform is worth surfacing.

recommended

State your Japanese language level honestly and specifically

State your Japanese language level honestly and specifically. Use the JLPT scale if you have taken the test, or describe it plainly: conversational, business-level, or native. Overclaiming Japanese proficiency and then failing a Japanese-language interview is a fast way to end a process, while honest self-assessment lets recruiters route you to appropriate roles.

recommended

Include work authorization context

Include work authorization context. A line like 'Authorized to work in Japan on a Highly Skilled Professional visa' or 'Will require visa sponsorship for Japan relocation' saves everyone time and does not count against you. SmartNews regularly sponsors technology visas.

recommended

Keep it to one or two pages

Keep it to one or two pages. SmartNews recruiters look at many résumés during a given week, and a concise two-page résumé that surfaces the three or four most relevant projects outperforms a five-page career history that buries the relevant work in the middle.

ATS System: Workable

SmartNews uses Workable as its applicant tracking system, hosted at apply.workable.com/smartnews. Workable is a mid-market ATS that is common among Japanese and European technology companies of SmartNews's size and stage. It handles the full hiring pipeline, including the public job board, résumé parsing, structured screening questions, interview scheduling hooks, and recruiter collaboration. The public-facing application flow is clean, modern, and mobile-responsive, and it is one of the more candidate-friendly ATS experiences in the market. The underlying parser is reasonably forgiving of formatting, but like every ATS it performs best on standard, single-column PDFs with clearly labeled section headings.

  • Apply through the Workable board at apply.workable.com/smartnews rather than through any third-party aggregator. LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor sometimes surface stale or misformatted versions of SmartNews postings, and applying natively on Workable ensures your application lands in the correct pipeline with the correct metadata.
  • Create a Workable candidate profile so you can track application status and receive updates without refreshing your email. Workable surfaces stage transitions, such as 'application received,' 'under review,' and 'interview scheduled,' directly in the candidate portal.
  • Use a PDF résumé rather than a Word document or a Google Docs export. Workable's parser handles PDF most reliably, and formatting is more likely to be preserved if a recruiter downloads your file.
  • Do not paste your résumé into the cover letter field as a substitute for uploading a file. The Workable parser reads the uploaded document and populates structured fields from it, not from the cover letter box.
  • Answer the structured screening questions thoughtfully rather than leaving them blank. Screening questions are used to route candidates to the right recruiter and to filter out obvious mismatches before human review, and blank answers often result in a silent rejection.
  • If you need to update your résumé after submission, most SmartNews postings allow you to withdraw and resubmit with a new version, or to contact the recruiter directly through the Workable messaging system. Do not submit multiple duplicate applications to the same role.

Interview Culture

SmartNews interview processes typically run four to five rounds over three to six weeks, which places the company squarely between the compressed Silicon Valley loop and the slower traditional Japanese multi-round process. The pace feels like a well-run Tokyo tech startup: efficient but not rushed, with deliberate effort to give candidates context about the team and the product between interviews. The process usually opens with a thirty-minute recruiter screen conducted in English for technology roles and in Japanese for business roles. The recruiter confirms your interest, walks through the role and the team, checks work authorization and timing, and does a high-level pass on your background. If the fit is clear, you move to a hiring-manager interview that goes deeper into your specific experience and how it maps to what the team needs. Technology candidates should expect a take-home coding exercise or a shared-screen technical interview, depending on the role and level. For machine learning and backend roles, take-home exercises are common and are designed to be completed in roughly four to six hours of focused work over a few days. The problem is usually realistic and tied to SmartNews's actual problem space, such as implementing a small recommendation or retrieval component, building a text classifier for news categorization, or designing an API and writing a reference implementation. The follow-up review is at least as important as the submission itself: expect a ninety-minute session in which two or three engineers walk through your code, ask you to explain design choices, probe the edges of your solution, and discuss what you would change if you had more time or were building it for production. For mobile, web, and systems roles, expect one or two live coding or system design interviews in addition to or instead of a take-home. Data structures and algorithms questions show up but are generally calibrated to the role rather than leetcode-hard puzzles. System design conversations are grounded in real scale: news feed delivery, recommendation infrastructure, real-time signal processing, and mobile client-server architecture for apps that serve tens of millions of users. The final rounds typically include a values or behavioral interview with a senior leader and often a bar-raiser-style conversation with a senior engineer from a different team. SmartNews leans hard on its stated values during these conversations, and candidates who can cite specific situations from their past work that demonstrate the values perform noticeably better than those who speak in generalities. Expect questions about ambiguity, decision-making with incomplete information, working across cultures, disagreement and resolution, and how you handle feedback. The cultural register of the company is quieter and more thoughtful than a typical American growth-stage startup, and loud self-promotion tends to land poorly. Candidates who speak precisely, acknowledge what they do not know, give credit to teammates, and show genuine curiosity about the news and recommendation problem space consistently receive stronger loop scores than candidates who optimize for confidence theater. English proficiency is expected at a professional working level for technology interviews, and accent is not a factor, but clarity of explanation is. Offers typically come within one to two weeks of the final interview. Compensation is a mix of base salary, a performance bonus, and, for some senior roles, equity or a long-term incentive plan. Tokyo compensation is competitive with Mercari, Indeed Japan, and LINE but sits below US FAANG levels, which is the honest trade-off for working in Tokyo with Japanese tax treatment and significantly lower cost of living for most line items other than housing and international travel. US-based roles pay at market for the Bay Area but the role count is small.

What SmartNews Looks For

  • Demonstrable depth in at least one technical area, whether that is machine learning systems, mobile engineering, distributed systems, or product design. SmartNews is small enough that it hires specialists rather than generalists for most technology seats, and candidates who try to be three-things-at-once often lose to candidates who are clearly excellent at one.
  • Comfort with ambiguity and with being given a problem rather than a spec. The company expects engineers and designers to define their own scope within a high-level objective, push back on bad assumptions, and ship without waiting to be told every next step.
  • Cross-cultural fluency. The Tokyo office is genuinely bilingual, and the most successful employees are the ones who can operate smoothly across Japanese and international working norms, including giving and receiving feedback in both registers, running meetings that mix native and non-native English speakers, and understanding when to escalate through hierarchy versus when to cut across it.
  • Genuine interest in news, media, and information quality. This is the single most common differentiator in final-round feedback. Candidates who can talk substantively about how news recommendation differs from general content recommendation, the tradeoffs between engagement and information quality, filter bubbles, publisher economics, or civic information access consistently outperform candidates who treat SmartNews as a generic tech employer.
  • Willingness to engage with a Japanese-headquartered company on its own terms. That means accepting that the Tokyo office is the center of gravity, that major product decisions are made there, and that timezone realities for US-based employees include some meetings at inconvenient hours. Candidates who pattern-match SmartNews to a Silicon Valley startup and expect the center of power to be in Palo Alto will be disappointed.
  • Pragmatism over ideology in technology choices. The company's stack is a considered mix: Scala and Python on the server, Kotlin and Swift on mobile, a mature machine learning platform built on TensorFlow and in-house tooling, and a willingness to replace components when something better emerges. Candidates who have strong dogmatic preferences about specific frameworks tend to struggle in interviews.
  • Written communication ability. A significant amount of product and technical decision-making at SmartNews happens in written documents, design docs, RFCs, and asynchronous threads. Candidates who can write a clear two-page design document are preferred over candidates who communicate only verbally.
  • Longevity mindset. Average tenure at SmartNews is longer than at comparably sized US startups, and the company hires for people who plan to be there for several years rather than for rapid hop-throughs. Candidates whose résumés show short stints without clear explanation face harder conversations in the values round.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does SmartNews use?
SmartNews uses Workable, hosted at apply.workable.com/smartnews. All live job postings on the careers site route to the same Workable board, and applications submitted natively through Workable land in the correct pipeline with the correct metadata.
Do I need to speak Japanese to work at SmartNews?
It depends on the role. Most engineering, machine learning, and design postings are English-friendly and do not require Japanese, consistent with SmartNews's bilingual Tokyo culture. Business development, publisher partnerships, sales, editorial, and customer-facing roles typically require business-level Japanese. Each Workable posting makes the language requirement reasonably clear, so read carefully before applying.
Does SmartNews sponsor work visas for international candidates?
Yes. SmartNews regularly sponsors visas for qualified technology hires relocating to Tokyo, most commonly under Japan's Highly Skilled Professional category, and operates a structured relocation program. For US-based roles, sponsorship is more limited and case-by-case.
What happened to SmartNews's US operation?
After rapid growth in the United States from roughly 2018 through 2022, SmartNews significantly retrenched its US presence starting in 2023, reducing headcount and refocusing resources on its profitable core Japan business. A Palo Alto office remains and continues to hire selectively, primarily for growth, ad partnerships, and strategic roles. The realistic center of opportunity today is Tokyo.
Is www.smartnews.com/en/careers a valid application URL?
No. That URL currently returns a 404. The canonical careers entry point is careers.smartnews.com, and from there every Apply button routes to the Workable board at apply.workable.com/smartnews.
What technologies does SmartNews use?
The dominant server-side languages are Scala and Python, with Kotlin and Swift on mobile and a machine learning platform built on TensorFlow and in-house tooling. Data infrastructure leans on standard large-scale stacks, including streaming pipelines, batch processing, and cloud-hosted analytics warehouses. Specifics vary by team, but candidates applying for engineering roles should expect a pragmatic, polyglot environment rather than a monoculture.
How long does the SmartNews interview process take?
Three to six weeks is typical, spanning a recruiter screen, a hiring-manager conversation, a technical exercise, deeper technical interviews, and a final values-focused round. The pace is faster than traditional Japanese enterprises and somewhat slower than Silicon Valley growth-stage startups, reflecting the company's hybrid culture.
Does SmartNews use take-home coding exercises?
Frequently, especially for machine learning and backend engineering roles. Take-homes are usually designed to be completed in four to six hours of focused work over a few days and are tied to realistic problem spaces like recommendation components or text classification. The follow-up review, in which engineers walk through your code with you, is treated as at least as important as the submission itself.
What does SmartNews pay in Tokyo versus Palo Alto?
Tokyo compensation is competitive with other English-friendly Japanese tech employers such as Mercari, Indeed Japan, and LINE, and is generally below US FAANG levels in absolute dollars. The tradeoff includes Japanese tax treatment, strong public services, and significantly lower cost of living for most categories other than housing and international travel. Palo Alto roles pay at or near Bay Area market for the specific function, but the role count is small.
Is SmartNews a good fit for someone early in their career?
It can be, particularly for Tokyo-based engineers with strong fundamentals who want to work on recommendation systems and news technology at meaningful scale in a bilingual environment. The company is not a pure new-grad factory in the mold of large US tech employers, and internship and entry-level role counts are modest. Early-career candidates should apply when a specifically matched role is open rather than assuming a general early-career pipeline exists.

Open Positions

SmartNews currently has 16 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 16 open positions at SmartNews

Related Resources

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Sources

  1. SmartNews Careers —
  2. SmartNews - Current Openings on Workable —
  3. SmartNews, Inc. Company Overview —
  4. Workable Applicant Tracking System —
  5. Japan Highly Skilled Professional Visa Program —