Sr. Software Engineer

Job Description:

Rakuten International oversees 7 businesses with over 4,000 employees globally. The brand is recognized for its leadership and innovation in e-commerce, digital content, advertising, entertainment and communications, bringing the joy of discovery and access to more than 1 billion members across the world. Our teams deliver on the company’s mission to delight merchants and customers through innovation, optimism, and teamwork.

Rakuten Rewards is a leading e-commerce company that enhances the way people shop by offering Cash Back, deals and rewards from more than 3,500 merchants. Founded in 1999, Rakuten has grown to become the go-to shopping destination for consumers, having paid out nearly $2 billion in Cash Back to its 15 million members. The company also operates ShopStyle, a leading fashion discovery destination, and Cartera Commerce, a top rewards platform for airlines and banks. For more information, visit www.rakuten.com.

Job Summary:

Rakuten Rewards is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer passionate about solving complex technical challenges to support our rapidly growing engineering team. This role presents an exciting opportunity to work on innovative products and services that enhance our user and partner experiences. As a Sr. Software Engineer, you'll be instrumental in building and maintaining mission-critical systems that power our platform, while developing new solutions to drive business growth and user engagement.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and build testable, scalable software solutions by deeply understanding business needs, studying information needs; conferring with stakeholders; studying existing systems flow; following the software; implementing industry best practices.
• Form strong partnership with product managers and stakeholders in other teams.
• Break work down into concise deliverables with a focus on iterative product delivery.
• Document and demonstrate solutions by leveraging charts, layouts, diagrams, documentations, clean design and code.
• Exercise independent judgment and creative problem-solving techniques in a highly complex environment using leading-edge technology.
• Respond to production issues when on-call, conduct independent analysis, and apply sound judgment to restore the system.
• Mentor junior engineers and collaborate with them on large-scale projects, fostering their growth and ensuring successful project delivery.

Qualifications:

• Excellent understanding of OOP design principles (loose coupling, encapsulation, SOLID etc.)
• Experience in application development using Java, Spring Boot, JPA
• Knowledge of working with OLTP databases like Postgres/MySQL or OLAP databases like Snowflake
• Experience in Java build automation tool like Maven or Gradle
• Knowledge of version control system like Git
• Experience with cloud native application development (Kubernetes, Serverless etc.)
• Experience in designing, implementing different Common Software Architectural Patterns including microservices architecture, event driven architectures
• Strong requirement gathering, analysis and collaboration skills
• Strong communication and presentation skill
• Experience with some different distributed system building blocks(e.g. Kafka, Redis, Elastic Search, or other similar NoSQL product)
• Experience with prompt engineering and optimizing LLM prompts for specific tasks to improve performance and accuracy.
• Plus - Experience with Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban)
• Plus - AWS Technologies - S3, SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, IAM etc.
• Plus - Experience to refactoring legacy systems
• Plus - Experience with building Agentic AI systems or chatbots using LLMs and integrating them with existing services

Minimum Requirements:

• B.S. or M.S in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of application development experience

Five Principles for Success
Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen
Passionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best
Hypothesize - Practice - Validate – Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory
Maximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile
Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for discretionary bonus, health, vision, dental insurance, 401k matching, PTO, Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.