Backend Engineer - AI for Business Department (AI4B)

Job Description:

About Rakuten

Rakuten Group, Inc. is the largest e-commerce company in Japan and provides a variety of services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and communications to users worldwide.

Department Overview

Rakuten is a global technology company dedicated to leveraging its membership ecosystem and data to positively impact society. Our AI for Business Department (AI4B) leads this initiative, operating as a center of excellence, focusing on developing and deploying innovative solutions that combine the frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) with established data science and machine learning techniques. These solutions enhance our products and services across our Commerce & Marketing, FinTech, and Mobile business units. We are a group of data scientists, data engineers, backend and frontend developers, product managers, project managers, and designers who are passionate about applying their skills to make a significant difference to potentially change society for the better through AI. 

Position:

Why We Hire

We are looking for a senior backend software engineer to work on our offerings - Rakuten AI for Business, and Rakuten AI APIs.

Position Details

- Rapidly develop and integrate multiple micro-services that will serve our Large Language Model based applications as AI APIs

- Design and develop highly scalable cloud infrastructure to host the backend APIs

- Deploy solutions in multi-cloud (Azure, GCP primarily) environments and set enterprise-grade secure networking

- Work together with the product team, and frontend team to ship product features consistently

- Be ready to engineer at the edge, by taking careful and quick action in stressful situations

Mandatory Qualifications:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Computer Engineering, Core Sciences, or other relevant majors.

- Minimum 3-5 years of experience in either backend service development or data engineering domain. 

- Strong practical knowledge in application development and deploying it in any of the popular cloud environments (Azure, GCP, AWS)

- Good understanding of unix operating systems, and networking concepts.  

- Strong programming skills using Python. Solid knowledge of practical implementation of various data structure and algorithms.

- Hands-on experience with at least one database (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL) and one data processing framework (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Flink, etc)

- A strong problem-solving mindset and good communication skills.  

- Self-motivated, effective communication and the ability to work together with teammates from diverse environments and backgrounds.

Desired Qualifications:

- Hands on experience in designing, developing and deploying an application end-to-end. (Drawing board to 100+ users)

- Machine Learning : Data preparation, algorithms (regression/classification), model development, serving predictive models in production

- Generative AI : Knowledge on LLMs, integrating LLMs into applications, LangChain

- Interest and trials with Generative AI (PoC applications, pet projects)

- Knowledge of Golang or similar highly efficient API/microservice programming language

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