Search Service Engineer, Booking Services Search Group - Search Department (SED)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 25, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 15, 2026.
Job Description:
Business Overview
Rakuten is one of the biggest marketplaces of Japan and is the largest internet ecosystem with a wide range of services ranging from e-commerce, Travel, Banking, Fintech, Food Delivery, Golf, Insurance, Instant Messaging, Mobile Network etc. Rakuten has over 140 services globally.
Our mission is to empower people and society through the internet while aiming at becoming the Global Innovation Company.
Department Overview
The Search Department is part of the AI Engineering Supervisory Department under the AI & Data Division in Rakuten. Search Department focuses on Search, Discovery, and Navigation experience for users of Rakuten. We in the Search Department help demand meet supply through our services that are engineered for scale, performance, and ease of use. We support 20 plus Rakuten Businesses across three different continents, 50 plus user functions and over a billion active users annually generating over two billion dollars in revenue directly from us. Search Service Reliability & Engineering Group is responsible for delivering some of the Mission critical Rakuten Applications used by millions of users.
Position:
Why We Hire
We are responsible for deploying and maintaining a distributed Search platform that empowers some of the biggest e-commerce and online travel agencies of Japan and enables Rakuten ecosystem services worldwide. Rakuten Search group is constantly striving to challenge what existing search technologies can do and going beyond. We are looking for a highly motivated software service engineers with commitment to customer satisfaction and a strong desire to create highest-quality Search platform for Rakuten Services.
Position Details
Responsibilities
(includes but are not limited to)
- Responsible for the delivery of search services to our customers. Master the inhouse search platform and customize to meet their business requirements, both functional and non-functional.
- Collaborate with customers, product managers, backend software engineers, the quality assurance teams and service reliability engineers to identify requirements and develop comprehensive solutions.
- Report defects of existing services and assist peers in triaging then resolving the issues.
- Drive continuous improvement in our processes through innovation and collaboration, leveraging automation and data-driven insights to enhance service quality and reliability.
- Review and occasionally write code to support your duty. Run end-to-end review of services deployment setup before production releases. Support in troubleshooting production issues.
Mandatory Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.
- Good knowledge of programming, preferably Java and/or Python.
- 5+ years of experience in Software Service Engineer and/or Software development, with proven recording of bringing new services to production.
- Experience in some search engine software, like Solr and Elastic, with good understanding lexical search in multiple languages.
- Experience with CI/CD tools (like Jenkins), integrating test automation seamlessly into continuous integration and deployment pipelines.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience in performance testing methodologies such as Gatling, Locust or K6.
- Exposure to modern search approaches, including LTR and Semantic Search.
- Experience of search in e-commerce and Travel context.
- Experience in custom support and troubleshooting.
- Experience communicating with technical and non-technical stakeholders across all levels of the organization.
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