Late-50s Senior Backend Engineer in Japan — Unsure What My Next Career Move Should Be
I’m a senior backend engineer in my late 50s with nearly 20 years of experience, mainly in Java/Kotlin backend development, distributed systems, AWS, and enterprise systems.
Since the summer of 2024, I had been in the U.S. trying to find work, but the market became extremely difficult and opportunities more or less disappeared for me. Eventually, I decided to return to Japan in 2025, my wife’s home country.
I knew finding work here would not be easy:
- I’m in my late 50s
- My Japanese is limited to daily conversation
- Professionally, I work almost entirely in English
As expected, it took me around 4 months to find work. By pure luck, a recruiter eventually contacted me and I was able to get a contract role at a large Japanese company.
Unfortunately, that contract is expected to end around July, and since April I’ve been actively job searching again. So far, I’m mostly getting rejected or hearing nothing back at all.
At this point, I honestly feel uncertain about what my long-term path should be.
I still need stable work for family reasons, and I’m trying to figure out whether I should continue pursuing senior backend engineering / IC roles, or whether I should start thinking about a different direction entirely.
I still enjoy engineering itself. I like building systems, solving problems, collaborating with other engineers, and mentoring or sharing knowledge when I can. But I also realize the market changes quickly, especially for older engineers.
If anyone here has gone through something similar — especially experienced engineers, expats, or people who reinvented themselves later in their careers — I’d genuinely appreciate hearing your experiences or advice.