How Money Forward Globalized Its Engineering Org, from CTO Nakade

Money Forward CTO Takuya Nakade explains how the company built a 31%-foreign-national engineering team across seven offices, including Vietnam, with a target of non-Japanese managers at every level.

• Foreign nationals are now 31% of Money Forward engineers, growing roughly 8 percentage points per year — Nakade expects them to exceed 50% within two years.
• Vietnam offices (Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, opened ~2018) are treated as equal to domestic offices; each was handed a brand-new product, not maintenance work, so ownership stayed with the local team.
• Removing the Japanese-language requirement for LinkedIn recruiting immediately opened a dramatically larger candidate pool; anime and gaming culture drives genuine interest in Japan-based roles.
• When the engineering org hit 60–70 people, Nakade promoted three trusted engineers to VP simultaneously, with explicit raises, to build a management layer that could support each other through hard moments.
• An internal “Challenge System” lets employees apply for open roles twice a year; their current manager cannot block the transfer, preserving autonomy and motivation.
• New regional offices opened only when someone inside the company volunteered to lead them — city priority followed the person, not population size or hiring metrics.
• Nakade’s next hard challenge: getting non-Japanese engineers into manager and eventually C-suite roles; all current CxOs are Japanese and executive meetings run in Japanese, so the language barrier still blocks full equity.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube