HORIUCHI Akihiko
@hiconyan
Working on the development of public cloud services at NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS.
  • Serving as Engineering Manager / Team Leader for a cloud services development team.
    • Leading decision-making and problem-solving on development with a focus on sustainability and extensibility in backend architecture and service specifications.
    • Enhancing service value and quality through collaborating with product and operations teams to define service specifications.
    • Coordinating with other microservice teams and the SRE team to ensure seamless integration and continuous improvement.
  • Built a strong technical foundation through years of hands-on backend development for cloud services as a software engineer.
    • Designed and implemented REST APIs to provide networks and servers as a service, background jobs (workflows) for provisioning these resources, and monitoring systems to collect metrics for users.
    • Led the design of backend architecture, established CI / CD pipelines, and migrated the infrastructure from virtual servers on-premises to Kubernetes on the cloud service.
NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan)
April 2026 - Present, Engineering Manager, Platform Services
  • Management of Network Function Services Development Team of Smart Data Platform
    • Team & Role
      • Engineering Manager / Team Leader on the team of 5+ people
    • Mission & Responsibilities
      • Network Function Service Development and Operations
        • Leading backend development and maintenance operations for self-managed / fully-managed network function services.
        • Driving expansion of services, improving profitability, and exploring new features to maximize value.
        • Improving development productivity, code quality, and release velocity to deliver outcomes safely and rapidly.
      • Autonomous Development Process with AI Agents
        • Driving AI agent-driven development processes to improve developer experience and development productivity.
      • In-House Application Framework and CI / CD Tools Contributions
        • Contributing to feature additions and usability improvements to the in-house framework and tools to ensure service value and continuity.
      • Talent Acquisition and Product Outreach
        • Recruiting talent for the team, raising product and company visibility through internal and external presentations.
October 2020 - March 2026, Senior Software Engineer, Platform Services
  • Backend Development for Firewall and Managed Load Balancer of Smart Data Platform
    • Team & Role
      • Tech Lead / Developer on the team of 5+ people
    • Mission & Responsibilities
      • Backend Development using Python (Tornado)
        • Designed and implemented REST APIs to provide self-managed firewalls and fully-managed load balancers.
        • Designed and implemented background jobs (workflows) to deploy network products (e.g., vSRX) on virtual servers and configure them via REST APIs.
        • Designed and implemented monitoring systems to collect metrics from network products (e.g., vSRX) via REST APIs and SNMP.
      • CI / CD Pipeline Management
        • Configured CI pipelines to integrate pytest using Prow, and to integrate Ruff using GitHub Actions.
        • Configured CD pipelines for Blue / Green Deployment on Kubernetes using Argo Rollouts and Tekton.
      • Infrastructure Automation
        • Developed Ansible modules and playbooks to automate provider configurations via backend APIs.
        • Developed Terraform providers to enable users to manage Firewall and Managed Load Balancer resources.
      • Documentation and Testing
        • Authored API references using OpenAPI and implemented scenario tests using Postman.
    • Accomplishments
      • Managed Load Balancer: Designed the backend from scratch, designed the frontend interface, and collaborated with product and operation teams to define service specifications, successfully achieving the planned release.
      • Firewall: Established a method to migrate the backend infrastructure from virtual servers on-premises to Kubernetes on the cloud service, and completed the migration in production without issues.
      • Internal Software: Contributed to overall quality of the service by fixing bugs and enhancing features to the in-house application framework and CI / CD tools, and sharing these improvements with other teams.
April 2016 - September 2020, Software Engineer, Platform Services
  • Backend Development for Baremetal Server and Dedicated Hypervisor of Smart Data Platform
    • Team & Role
      • Scrum Master / Developer on the team of 10+ people
    • Mission & Responsibilities
      • Backend Development using Ruby (Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq)
        • Designed and implemented REST APIs for on-demand provisioning of physical servers and hypervisors.
        • Designed and implemented background jobs (workflows) to configure BIOS / UEFI of physical servers using BMC (iLO, iDRAC, iRMC, etc.).
        • Designed and implemented background jobs (workflows) to install operating systems (e.g., RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, ESXi) on physical servers using PXE, Kickstart, and Preseed.
        • Designed and implemented monitoring systems to collect metrics from physical servers via REST APIs and SNMP.
      • CI / CD Pipeline Management
        • Configured CI pipelines to integrate RSpec using Jenkins, and to integrate Rubocop using GitHub Actions.
        • Configured CD pipelines for Blue / Green Deployment on virtual servers using Jenkins and Ansible.
      • On-premises Backend Infrastructure Operations
        • Maintained and managed Redis and RabbitMQ.
        • Built monitoring and logging platforms using Consul, Fluentd, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
    • Accomplishments
      • Release Automation: Reduced operational workload and minimized human errors by automating release processes using Jenkins and Ansible, ensuring idempotency and consistency.
      • PXE Issue Resolution: Resolved RHEL / CentOS boot issues via iPXE by evaluating and introducing pxelinux, successfully achieving the planned release.
      • Process Improvement: Contributed to reducing construction period for region and group expansions through collaborating with the delivery team to redesign and optimize procedures and processes.
Aqutras Inc. (Kagawa, Japan)
April 2014 - March 2016, Software Engineer (Part Time)
  • Developed web applications for managing advertisements and schedules
  • Built monitoring and logging platforms for web applications
Kagawa University (Kagawa, Japan)
April 2014 - March 2016, Master of Engineering
  • Studied and researched reliability-based information systems engineering
    • Thesis
      • Improving and evaluating auto-scaling algorithm for distributed web systems
April 2010 - March 2014, Bachelor of Engineering
  • Studied and researched reliability-based information systems engineering
    • Thesis
      • Improving and evaluating load observation function of web systems fit for cloud
Skills
  • Programming Languages, Frameworks, Libraries
    • Python (Tornado, pytest, Ansible Module)
    • Ruby (Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, RSpec)
    • Go (Terraform Provider)
    • JavaScript (React, Vue.js, Mithril.js)
  • Tools, Technologies
    • Ansible
    • Consul, Terraform
    • Docker, Kubernetes (Argo Rollouts, Tekton)
    • Git, GitHub (Actions)
    • Fluentd, Elasticsearch, Kibana
    • QEMU, KVM, libvirt
  • Operating Systems, Middleware
    • Linux (RHEL / CentOS, Ubuntu), VMware (ESXi)
    • Redis, RabbitMQ
  • CI / CD, DevOps
    • Jenkins
    • Prow
  • Others
    • IPMI, Redfish, PXE, Kickstart, Preseed
    • OpenAPI, Postman
Certifications
  • Applied Information Technology Engineer (2016)
  • Certified Scrum Master (2022)
  • Certified Scrum Product Owner (2023)
Links
2026