Technical Lead - Platform Engineering Section, Marketing Cloud Platform Department (MCPD)

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Job Description:

Department Overview

The Marketing Cloud Platform Department (MCPD) is responsible for leading the strategic direction, development, and implementation of the company's marketing-related product portfolio. Our core mission is to empower Rakuten's internal marketing teams by providing engaging, respectful, and cost-efficient marketing platforms centered on customer needs.

Position:

Why We Hire

The Marketing Cloud Platform is continually expanding its scope, and we are actively seeking senior-level engineering talent to collaborate on upcoming company-wide strategic programs. This position requires mature technical expertise across various engineering domains and a strong collaborative mindset to effectively engage with stakeholders throughout the company.

Position Details

The Technical Lead will oversee and drive the execution of the full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Responsibilities will vary based on project needs, business priorities, and the Technical Lead’s expertise, but the role requires active involvement from the earliest phases of initiatives, including requirements analysis, platform-wide architecture and solution design that spans multiple products and services, and technical decision-making. The Technical Lead will provide hands-on leadership through development, quality assurance, deployment, and ongoing DevOps/SRE activities, ensuring the delivery of scalable, reliable, and high-quality solutions across the platform. This position offers broad exposure and the opportunity to lead and contribute across all stages of the SDLC while guiding technical direction, architectural consistency, and best practices. English fluency is mandatory while Japanese language is good to have.

Work Environment

We have a diverse team composed of people from across the globe, distributed across multiple locations such as Tokyo, Singapore, and Bangalore.

Mandatory Qualifications:

- 5+ years of professional software development experience, with strong expertise in designing, building, and leading scalable backend systems.

- Demonstrated experience leading platform-wide architecture and solution design that spans multiple products and services, including translating business requirements into high-level and detailed architectural designs.

- Proven track record of leading the architecture, design, development, and production rollout of scalable and resilient microservices-based platforms.

- Hands-on leadership experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes, for deploying, operating, and scaling distributed systems in production environments.

- Strong proficiency in modern programming languages and frameworks, including Java; experience with React, PHP, and Python is a plus.

- Proven experience working with relational databases such as MySQL, with a solid understanding of data modeling, performance optimization, scalability, and reliability.

- Deep understanding of software engineering best practices, including automated testing strategies, code reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and version control using Git, with the ability to set standards and mentor engineers.

- In-depth knowledge of architectural patterns and software design principles, with the ability to define technical direction and apply these principles effectively to complex, real-world systems.

- Demonstrated leadership and collaboration skills, including experience mentoring engineers and driving effective collaboration across cross-functional teams such as Product, QA, SRE, and Infrastructure.

- Extensive experience leading end-to-end product troubleshooting and incident resolution, coordinating across SRE/Infrastructure, Platform/Middleware, Backend, and Frontend teams; accountable for the full lifecycle from triage and root-cause analysis to implementing fixes and driving preventive measures to ensure non-recurrence.

- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts and architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Demonstrated leadership and collaboration skills, with experience mentoring engineers and driving effective teamwork across cross-functional teams.

Desired Qualifications:

- Hands-on experience with data engineering principles, including ETL processes, data warehousing, and working with large datasets.

- Extensive experience with distributed computing concepts and technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis.).

- Familiarity with various database technologies, including relational and NoSQL databases.

- Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and their relevant services for compute, storage, and data processing.

- Experience leading an engineering team, demonstrating proficiency in people management, project oversight, and cost management.

- Experience in the MarTech (Marketing Technology) industry.

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