Platform Engineer for AI Native SDLC - Business Support Development Department (BSD)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 14, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 8, 2026. Rakuten scores A on the Alion truth index.
Job Description:
Business Overview
We are the development department that supports Rakuten's founding business, Rakuten Ichiba.
Rakuten Group, Inc. is founded in 1997 and continuing to this day, embodies Rakuten's mission of empowering people and society through innovation, and has created a system that allows people to easily open stores beyond the limits of the business sphere, delivering the joy of shopping to users throughout Japan. We are now one of the largest EC companies in Japan.
Rakuten Ichiba service page
Department Overview
Rakuten Ichiba is a place where various merchants gather, and its diversity is what makes Rakuten Ichiba attractive. Our department is responsible for developing and providing tools and services necessary for the operation of each merchant, regardless of their genre, industry, or size, in order to enable the diverse merchants on Rakuten Ichiba to thrive in e-commerce and provide customers with the experience of "Shopping is Entertainment"
Position:
Why We Hire
Our department is responsible for developing new features for more than 10 different services and delivering them to customers on a regular basis. These services are required to meet the high-quality standards provided by Rakuten while being released quickly. Platforms such as CI/CD pipelines, which form the foundation of software delivery, play a critical role in this process. We are looking for a DevOps engineer who can lead platform engineering and contribute to the rapid release of high-quality systems.
Position Details
- Design & Develop: Design, build, and maintain features and components of our Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with a focus on usability, scalability, and performance.
- Integrate & Automate: Integrate various internal and external tools (CI/CD, monitoring, security, cloud services, etc.) into the IDP and build and automate seamless developer workflows.
- Evangelize & Support: Act as an advocate for the IDP, providing technical guidance, documentation, and support to help development teams effectively utilize the platform.
- Collaborate & Innovate: Work closely with product owners, other engineers, and development stakeholders to lead requirements definition, feature prioritization, and platform roadmap planning.
- Improve & Optimize: Continuously improve platform reliability, security, and overall developer experience through proactive monitoring, refactoring, and performance tuning.
- Contribute to Strategy: Influence the technical direction of the IDP and actively contribute to architectural decisions and technology selection.
Work Environment
The DevOps team consists of engineers with diverse backgrounds, including DevOps engineers, development engineers, infrastructure engineers, database administrators, and technical support staff, who work together collaboratively.
IDP Concepts & Principles, TypeScript / JavaScript, Go, Python, Node.js, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm Charts, CI/CD Tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD), Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana
Mandatory Qualifications:
- 7+ years of hands-on experience as a software engineer, covering the full software development lifecycle from requirements definition through design, implementation, testing, release, and operation.
- Senior-level development skills. Proven experience leading the design and implementation of complex systems and driving team code quality and productivity through code reviews and technical decision-making.
- Strong expertise in programming languages: one or more of TypeScript/JavaScript (especially React.js for frontend), Go, Python, or Node.js.
- Hands-on experience applying Agentic AI (coding agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor, or LLM-based agent systems) to real-world development work, with practical insight into effective usage patterns, limitations, and impact on the development process.
- Ability to identify pain points in development processes and tooling based on first-hand experience as a developer, and to conceive, propose, and deliver solutions that are truly useful from the perspective of the developers who use the platform.
- Basic understanding of software development and delivery using CI/CD, containers (Docker), and a major cloud platform (one or more of AWS, Azure, GCP). (Hands-on DevOps experience in building and operating these is not required.)
- Excellent communication skills. Ability to clearly and concisely convey complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong commitment to teamwork and collaboration. Ability to work effectively within cross-functional teams, share knowledge, and contribute to a positive team environment.
- Strong ownership and commitment. Proactive approach to tackling challenges, driving projects to completion, and taking responsibility for results.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience in designing, building, and operating Internal Developer Platforms (IDP), developer tooling, or CI/CD pipelines (including automated tests).
- Hands-on experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles.
- Experience with container orchestration using Kubernetes and Helm Charts, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform.
- Experience in cloud environment management (especially GCP).
- Experience in web service operations (including monitoring and troubleshooting).
- Experience in designing and developing LLM-based agents or tools (e.g., MCP servers, AI workflows, internal AI assistants), or in introducing and establishing Agentic AI practices across a development team.
- Experience leading Developer Experience (DevEx) improvements (e.g., interviewing developers, measuring productivity metrics, planning and executing improvement initiatives).
- Experience in microservices development.
- Experience working in multicultural and multigenerational teams.
Others Information:
Additional information on Location
Tokyo
Additional information on English Qualification
The applicants must have business level English skill.
#engineer #infrastructureengineer #commerce #RakutenIchiba #Python #Csharp #Java
Languages:
English (Overall - 4 - Fluent)