Djem Toker

Djem Toker

Lead engineer

Rakuten

Biography

Technology leader with more than 15 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, and Enterprise Architecture. Graduated from Sup-Galilée Engineering School (University Paris 13, France) and based in Tokyo, Japan for over 15 years. Experienced in leading engineering organizations, driving cloud-native transformation, and building reliable, scalable platforms across fintech, e-commerce, gaming, and financial services. Passionate about technology, operational excellence, and developing high-performing engineering teams.

Interests
  • Web technology
  • System & Web Security
  • Container & virtualization
  • SRE related subjects
  • Deep learning, big data and AI
Education
  • Engineering diploma in software engineering, 2012

    Institut Galilee faculty of sciences, University Paris 13

  • 2 years technical degree in computer sciences, 2009

    University Paris 13 - University institute of technology

  • High school diploma, 2007

    Rene Cassin High school

Skills

php

Building small and big with it since 2006

java

Having fun to make application and web services

linux

Love open source penguin(s)

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Head of SRE (Group Engineering Manager)
Leading Fintech Company
Dec 2023 – Present Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Lead the SRE organization responsible for the reliability, availability, scalability, and operational excellence of one of Japan’s largest payment platforms.
  • Own production operations, incident management, disaster recovery (DR/BCP) capacity planning and testing, observability, and service resilience.
  • Lead an organization of approximately 20 engineers, including engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
  • Define organizational structure, hiring plans, and career development programs.
  • Established and drove SRE strategy, reliability governance, and operational excellence practices across multiple engineering organizations.
  • Partnered with executive leadership and engineering organizations to define reliability objectives, operational KPIs, and long-term platform strategy.
  • Work closely with other Divisions and Group Companies Service, Infrastructure, Security, and Executive Leadership to deliver highly available, secure, and scalable service.
 
 
 
 
 
Enterprise Architect (Vice President)
Jul 2023 – Dec 2023 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • In charge of the Enterprise Architecture at Nomura in the Group IT Strategy Dept.
  • Assessment of the current IT infrastructure and target state. Accordingly adjust IT Policy for future company rules under the CTO office in cooperation with IT Risk and Control, infrastructure and application related department.
  • Coordinating Retail and Wholesale activities toward a shared governance, policy, infrastructure and platform in general. Part of the modernization of the company IT infrastructure project.
 
 
 
 
 
Lead engineer (Assistant Manager)
Oct 2016 – Jul 2023 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Vice manager for Technical Account Management group, in charge of the management of several large company service infrastructure as well as alliance related services.
  • Assistant manager creating SRE&DevOps group (10 engineers) for the department (300 engineers) including recruitment, team management (goal settings, evaluation, training), budgeting, strategic planning in phase with the company vision and strategy.
  • Creating and providing logging (ELK), alerting and monitoring platform, native deployment and integration solution (CI/CD) as well as providing best practices guideline and development framework for the department.
  • Migrating multiple complex services (over 50 billion JPY gross profit) from legacy monolithic infrastructure and design to micro-service cloud native (k8s) platform.
  • Creation of a new services from scratch from the initial business unit discussions to the service release and maintenance for over 2 years. Participating in the group strategy meetings, handling business needs and inquiries. Creating development roadmaps for each feature and handling project management.
  • Role of infrastructure and software architect for the department. Standardized technology stacks, development frameworks, and engineering practices across the organization. Discussing and deciding on common development pattern, tools, software and infrastructure design. Supporting entire section at the technical level.
 
 
 
 
 
Software engineer
Jan 2016 – Oct 2016 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Development of the client side of the mock for a potential future game under Unity.
  • Design and development of the server side including design of the production infrastructure.
 
 
 
 
 
Software engineer
May 2014 – Jan 2016 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Developing mainly and maintaining the backend for the social game “Sword of Phantasia” which includes event engine additions and collaboration with QA and support.
  • In charge of the engineering of the localization for the social game “Cross summoner” released worldwide which include gameplay change, multiplayer event addition as well as testing and collaboration, licensing with publisher such as Nexon and ProSieben.
 
 
 
 
 
Software engineer
Tibanne K.K.
Dec 2013 – May 2014 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Developping and maintaining the website, API and backend related to Mt.Gox bitcoin exchange.
  • Working on the Mt.Gox platform framework and ensuring that there is no issue along with daily code maintenance operation. This include as well pro-active collabortation with the support team to ensure bug fixing and providing technical information on the logic of the platform when needed.
 
 
 
 
 
Software engineer
Dec 2012 – Dec 2013 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Developping frontend and backend of website that has a relationship to social media for multinational company such as Red Bull, EA-Games or Heineken. This can go from a simple campaign site to a site that handle a competition based on social network buzz score such as Red Bull live on the road.
  • Deploying and keeping the production environement available. This include deploying new servers and scaling when needed the infrastructure to handle the charge which can change over time.
 
 
 
 
 
Software engineering trainee
Apr 2012 – Sep 2013 Tokyo

Responsibilities include:

  • Built a new system to automatically detect, report the platform issues and collect statistical information about the system. Detecting bottleneck and improving performance and scalability of the system.
  • Refactoring some part of the code, improving functional testing and documenting new changes of the application. Working on daily fix and issues.

Contact