{"id":2523154,"url":"https://alion.io/job/rakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer","title":"QA Automation Engineer","company":{"id":123,"name":"Rakuten Rewards","domain":"rakuten.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/rakuten-group","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":37,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["San Mateo, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":96442,"max":163680,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":163680},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"JUnit","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Pytest","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"TestNG","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T14:06:18Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"Job Description:\nRakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community.\nRakuten is a leading shopping platform that offers Cash Back on purchases from your favorite brands. By partnering with thousands of brands in apparel, beauty and wellness, dining, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscription boxes, and more, Rakuten helps members save and get more on everyday purchases. Since its founding in 1999, Rakuten has become the largest and most rewarding shopping program, and its members have earned $4.6 billion in Cash Back just for shopping through Rakuten. For more information, visit Rakuten.com.\n\nJob Summary:\n\n We are seeking a hands-on QA Automation Engineer to join the Productivity Engineering organization at Rakuten Rewards. You will help ensure the quality of backend services, APIs, event-driven systems, and data pipelines while building automation and AI-powered tools that improve testing efficiency and release confidence. In this individual contributor role, you will combine software development skills with quality engineering expertise to create reusable validation capabilities, develop AI-assisted testing workflows, and help engineering teams identify defects earlier. You will work closely with developers, QA, product, and DevOps teams throughout the development lifecycle.\nKey Responsibilities:\nQuality Ownership: Own end-to-end quality for assigned backend features - define the test strategy, expand coverage with AI tooling, and keep validation continuous through the development lifecycle. Partner with engineering and product on requirements and release readiness.\nRisk Detection: Analyze requirements, service behavior, and production signals to surface edge cases, coverage gaps, missing telemetry, flaky tests, and configuration drift early.\nBackend Test Automation: Build and maintain API, integration, and end-to-end tests in Java or a comparable language. Use AI coding assistants and test agents to accelerate development, widen coverage, and reduce maintenance.\nInfrastructure and CI/CD: Deploy and validate backend services in Docker and Kubernetes. Integrate automated tests and AI-assisted checks into GitHub release workflows so every change returns actionable quality feedback.\nAgent-Based Testing: Develop AI agents that exercise API workflows, generate test data, run exploratory backend testing, and validate interactions across services and databases. Verify business rules, API contracts, and data consistency across environments.\nDistributed Systems and Performance: Validate microservices, event-driven workflows, message queues, and asynchronous pipelines, including retries, duplicate events, and failure recovery. Use SQL and AI-assisted analysis to detect data anomalies, and run load tests to assess latency, throughput, and scalability.\nProduction Troubleshooting: Independently investigate production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and tools such as Bits AI. Group related failures, support defect triage, and drive root cause analysis. Validate findings, communicate release risk clearly, and promote effective AI-assisted quality practices across engineering teams.\nQualifications:\nStrong proficiency in Java or a similar programming language, with hands-on software development experience building test frameworks, automation services, AI tooling, or developer productivity solutions. \nPractical experience applying LLMs or AI coding tools to testing and development workflows - generating tests, analyzing failures, or supporting defect triage - with the ability to review and validate their outputs.\n Strong experience testing REST APIs and backend services, with expertise in writing complex SQL queries and validating data integrity and business rules in PostgreSQL.\n Understanding of event-driven systems and experience testing message queues or streaming workflows such as Kafka, including asynchronous behavior and error handling.\nExperience with test frameworks such as pytest, JUnit, TestNG, or Spock, and GitHub workflows including pull requests, code reviews, branching, release management, and CI/CD pipelines.\nPractical knowledge of DevOps practices, AWS services, Docker, and Kubernetes, including deployment validation and troubleshooting test environment issues.\nStrong analytical and communication skills, with the ability to own testing activities independently and collaborate across teams.\nDemonstrated ability to investigate production issues independently, using AI-assisted troubleshooting tools such as Bits AI or similar solutions to support evidence-based root cause analysis.\nMinimum Requirements:\n3 to 5 years of experience in Quality Assurance or Quality Engineering, including at least 2 years of hands-on backend or API test automation\n5-7 years Preferred\nBachelor's Degree\nMaster's Degree Preferred\nISTQB Foundation Level Certification or equivalent Preferred\nFive Principles for Success\nOur 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.\nAlways improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen\nPassionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best\nHypothesize - Practice - Validate - Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory\nMaximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile\nSpeed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team\nRakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.\nAs part of our Rakuten interview process, we encourage applicants to use their own words, rather than AI-generated content. Tell us your story in a way that's personal and authentic.\nAt 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.\nUSD $96,442.50 - $163,680.00 annually","description_format":"text","description_chars":7289,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Dental insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Loyalty Programs","Coupons, Deals & Cashbacks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-14T11:43:18Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":94,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.935,"p_room":1,"age_days":6,"expected_fill_days":37,"reasons":["conf:20","urgency","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":163680,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/rakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/rakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T18:22:07Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14248,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":123},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=123"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Frakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Frakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Frakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/rakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Frakuten-rewards-qa-automation-engineer"}]}