Representative Takuya Tominaga Interview: "Why a Toshiba Engineer of 9 Years Bet His Life on 'AI Transformation for SMEs'"
Takuya Tominaga, who worked as an engineer at Toshiba for 9 years, discusses why he is dedicating his life to AI transformation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). His diverse experiences at Kosen, NAIST, and Toshiba are the source of his passion for AI transformation support.
📋 Article Processing Timeline
- 📰 Published: April 29, 2026 at 00:10
- 🔍 Collected: April 28, 2026 at 15:31
- 🤖 AI Analyzed: April 28, 2026 at 16:20 (48 min after Collected)
From Kumamoto Kosen to NAIST, and then to Toshiba—the origin of an engineer.
—Could you tell us about the starting point of your career, Mr. Tominaga?
Tominaga: I graduated from the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering at Kumamoto Kosen. I was immersed in programming for five years from the age of 15, followed by two years in the advanced course of Production System Engineering. Kosen offers a more practical education than universities. I grew up in a world where hands-on experience was everything. In 2006, I was a finalist in the Supercomputing Contest organized by Tokyo Tech and Osaka University. This means I was working with supercomputers at an age equivalent to a high school student.
—After that, you went on to Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST).
Tominaga: Yes. I earned my master's degree from the Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST. That was for three years, from 2012 to 2015. During my time there, I focused on academic presentations, and in 2014, I received the Best Presentation Award, ranking first out of 293 entries at DICOMO2014 of the Information Processing Society of Japan. I also received the Excellent Paper Award simultaneously, and the Excellent Poster Award at DPSWS2014. It was a triple academic award in one year.
—You were also very active in internships during your student days, weren't you?
Tominaga: At Akatsuki, I was deeply involved for about half a year, developing a new official website for the social game "Cinderella Series" using Ruby on Rails. I also built a smartphone chat app with iOS/Objective-C and Ruby on Rails. At Speee, I developed a web app with a team during a two-week internship and won the advanced course. I also gained engineering internship experience at Exmotion. Additionally, I was selected as a second-generation participant in the "MOVIDA SCHOOL" seed acceleration program organized by Taizo Son.
—Akatsuki, Speee, Exmotion. All three companies later went public.
Tominaga: Looking back, it's an interesting coincidence. It was significant to experience the atmosphere of growing companies while I was a student. I learned the speed of startups firsthand during that time.
First job at Toshiba—developing a 200,000-line web app.
—You joined Toshiba in 2015. What kind of work did you do initially?
Tominaga: My first assignment was at the IoT Technology Center of Industrial ICT Solutions Company. A major project there was developing an internal web application. The code size was approximately 200,000 lines. It was a system that collected data from various internal development projects, allowing management to visualize it with dashboards and charts.
—How was it specifically used?
Tominaga: It allowed for side-by-side comparison of the progress of multiple projects. Decisions like "This project is behind compared to others" or "There's a bottleneck in this process" could be understood at a glance with numbers and graphs. It was a tool to support management's decision-making. For the backend, I built a clustering system on AWS using ECS, and also created a data utilization platform for software developers.
—That's a large-scale, full-stack development right from the start.
Tominaga: In addition, I worked on research to predict fault-prone modules—modules prone to bugs. This was a software engineering analysis. In April 2022, I received the Business Award for Excellence from the Software Technology Center for this series of work.
From HDD firmware to 7,000 lines of Terraform—a wide range of technologies.
—You also worked on HDD firmware development during your career.
Tominaga: From October 2019 for about a year, I participated in the development of firmware for nearline HDDs. This was a completely low-level world. Every byte of memory made a difference. Bugs were absolutely unforgivable because they directly led to data loss. It was a completely different kind of tension compared to the 200,000-line web app.
—And then you returned to a higher layer.
Tominaga: From October 2020 onwards, I moved to designing a data storage and analysis platform for consumers. This was an infrastructure design exceeding 7,000 lines just in Terraform .tf files. Around this time, my AWS knowledge deepened significantly, and in January 2024, I obtained all 12 AWS certifications in about a month. This was a first for Toshiba and the second person within the Toshiba Group to achieve this.
—All 12 certifications in one month. Why such speed?
Tominaga: My experience developing a 200,000-line web app, covering everything from backend to frontend, my experience mastering low-level aspects with HDD firmware, and my experience designing infrastructure with 7,000 lines of Terraform. Because I had passed through all layers in practical work, the exam scope was almost entirely "knowledge I had used in my job." It felt like my accumulated practical experience was directly converted into qualifications, rather than just theoretical study.
Toshiba Tec CDO Office—Google and
—Could you tell us about the starting point of your career, Mr. Tominaga?
Tominaga: I graduated from the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering at Kumamoto Kosen. I was immersed in programming for five years from the age of 15, followed by two years in the advanced course of Production System Engineering. Kosen offers a more practical education than universities. I grew up in a world where hands-on experience was everything. In 2006, I was a finalist in the Supercomputing Contest organized by Tokyo Tech and Osaka University. This means I was working with supercomputers at an age equivalent to a high school student.
—After that, you went on to Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST).
Tominaga: Yes. I earned my master's degree from the Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST. That was for three years, from 2012 to 2015. During my time there, I focused on academic presentations, and in 2014, I received the Best Presentation Award, ranking first out of 293 entries at DICOMO2014 of the Information Processing Society of Japan. I also received the Excellent Paper Award simultaneously, and the Excellent Poster Award at DPSWS2014. It was a triple academic award in one year.
—You were also very active in internships during your student days, weren't you?
Tominaga: At Akatsuki, I was deeply involved for about half a year, developing a new official website for the social game "Cinderella Series" using Ruby on Rails. I also built a smartphone chat app with iOS/Objective-C and Ruby on Rails. At Speee, I developed a web app with a team during a two-week internship and won the advanced course. I also gained engineering internship experience at Exmotion. Additionally, I was selected as a second-generation participant in the "MOVIDA SCHOOL" seed acceleration program organized by Taizo Son.
—Akatsuki, Speee, Exmotion. All three companies later went public.
Tominaga: Looking back, it's an interesting coincidence. It was significant to experience the atmosphere of growing companies while I was a student. I learned the speed of startups firsthand during that time.
First job at Toshiba—developing a 200,000-line web app.
—You joined Toshiba in 2015. What kind of work did you do initially?
Tominaga: My first assignment was at the IoT Technology Center of Industrial ICT Solutions Company. A major project there was developing an internal web application. The code size was approximately 200,000 lines. It was a system that collected data from various internal development projects, allowing management to visualize it with dashboards and charts.
—How was it specifically used?
Tominaga: It allowed for side-by-side comparison of the progress of multiple projects. Decisions like "This project is behind compared to others" or "There's a bottleneck in this process" could be understood at a glance with numbers and graphs. It was a tool to support management's decision-making. For the backend, I built a clustering system on AWS using ECS, and also created a data utilization platform for software developers.
—That's a large-scale, full-stack development right from the start.
Tominaga: In addition, I worked on research to predict fault-prone modules—modules prone to bugs. This was a software engineering analysis. In April 2022, I received the Business Award for Excellence from the Software Technology Center for this series of work.
From HDD firmware to 7,000 lines of Terraform—a wide range of technologies.
—You also worked on HDD firmware development during your career.
Tominaga: From October 2019 for about a year, I participated in the development of firmware for nearline HDDs. This was a completely low-level world. Every byte of memory made a difference. Bugs were absolutely unforgivable because they directly led to data loss. It was a completely different kind of tension compared to the 200,000-line web app.
—And then you returned to a higher layer.
Tominaga: From October 2020 onwards, I moved to designing a data storage and analysis platform for consumers. This was an infrastructure design exceeding 7,000 lines just in Terraform .tf files. Around this time, my AWS knowledge deepened significantly, and in January 2024, I obtained all 12 AWS certifications in about a month. This was a first for Toshiba and the second person within the Toshiba Group to achieve this.
—All 12 certifications in one month. Why such speed?
Tominaga: My experience developing a 200,000-line web app, covering everything from backend to frontend, my experience mastering low-level aspects with HDD firmware, and my experience designing infrastructure with 7,000 lines of Terraform. Because I had passed through all layers in practical work, the exam scope was almost entirely "knowledge I had used in my job." It felt like my accumulated practical experience was directly converted into qualifications, rather than just theoretical study.
Toshiba Tec CDO Office—Google and