Staff Engineer, Software Engineering

Greetings from Rakuten Symphony

Why should you choose us?

Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security.

Rakuten Symphony has operations in Japan, the United States, Singapore, India, South Korea, Europe, and the Middle East Africa region. For more information, visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com

 

Building on the technology Rakuten used to launch Japan’s newest mobile network, we are taking our mobile offering global.

To support our ambitions to provide an innovative cloud-native telco platform for our customers, Rakuten Symphony is looking to recruit and develop top talent from around the globe. We are looking for individuals to

join our team across all functional areas of our business – from sales to engineering, support functions to product development.

 

Let’s build the future of mobile telecommunications together!

 

About Rakuten Group, Inc. (TSE: 4755) is a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Founded in Tokyo in 1997 as an online marketplace, Rakuten has expanded to offer services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications to approximately 2 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has over 30,000 employees, and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/.

Job Description:

We are looking for a Technical Lead to design, build, and own scalable OSS platforms for telecom network monitoring, analytics, and automation. The role requires strong hands-on expertise in Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, along with Big Data and streaming technologies such as Apache Spark, NOSQL DB, and Kafka. In addition to backend and data engineering, you will play a key role in cloud-native application delivery, including building Docker images and operating services on Kubernetes environments using Helm.

The candidate is expected to take technical ownership of complex OSS components and contribute to AI-enabled use cases, and predictive analytics. This role requires strong domain, technical and analytical skills, attention to detail, and a passion for delivering exceptional software experiences.

Key Responsibilities :

Architecture & Design

• Lead the design and own end-to-end architecture of high-performance systems

• Design and manage event-driven systems using Apache Kafka

• Design microservices-based architectures with high availability and resiliency.

• Drive solution design discussions with Product Owners and Architects

• Design cloud-native, scalable architectures supporting both horizontal and vertical scaling in Kubernetes environments

Core Development

• Develop backend services using Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate

• Build and optimize real-time and batch data pipelines using Apache Spark

• Optimize Spark jobs and Kafka consumers for throughput and low latency.

• Ensure backward compatibility and data integrity across releases

• Ensure high-quality code with strong unit, integration, and security coverage

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm

Platform Engineering

• Integrate OSS platforms with EMS/NMS systems using SNMP, REST, and file-based ingestion.

• Optimize Spark jobs and Kafka consumers for throughput, latency, and reliability.

• Work with databases such as MySQL, Cassandra, ClickHouse, and other Big Data stores.

• Improve system performance, storage efficiency, and scalability across OSS components.

Reliability & Security

• Ensure services & pipelines are highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure

• Implement validation, throttling, retry, and back-pressure handling mechanisms

• Participate in root cause analysis and resolution of production issues

AI / ML Enablement

• Drive AI/ML-based OSS use cases, including:

o Alarm noise reduction and correlation

o Anomaly detection in network KPIs

o Auto-RCA and predictive failure analysis

• Collaborate with data science teams to productionize ML models.

• Integrate ML inference into real-time and batch OSS pipelines.

• Measure operational impact and continuously improve AI-driven features

Technical Leadership

• Mentor junior engineers and enforce coding and design best practices

• Review architecture, code, dashboards, and alert strategies

• Partner with DevOps, SRE, and Product teams to deliver committed outcomes

• Contribute to product roadmap, technical strategy, and automation initiatives

Required Skills & Experience :

Core Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate/JPA.

• Deep understanding of microservices and distributed systems.

• Strong experience with Apache Kafka and event-driven architectures.

• Hands-on experience with Apache Spark (batch and/or streaming).

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases (MySQL, Cassandra, ClickHouse).

• Hands-on experience on AI/ML usecase end to end.

System Design & Scale

• Experience designing high-throughput, low-latency systems

• Strong understanding of scalability, resiliency, and failure handling.

• Ability to optimize systems for performance, reliability, and cost

Leadership & Collaboration

• Proven experience as a technical lead or senior engineer.

• Ability to translate business problems into observability solutions.

• Strong communication skills across engineering and leadership teams.

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience in Telco / large-scale platforms.

• Proven experience as a Technical Lead.

• Experience with Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Jaeger.

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments

Rakuten SHUGI Principles:

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviours that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 SHUGI Principles of Success.

• Always improve, always advance. Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen.
• Be passionately professional. Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best.
• Hypothesize - Practice - Validate - Shikumika. Use the Rakuten Cycle to success in unknown territory.
• Maximize Customer Satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction for workers in a service industry is to see their customers smile.
• Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! Always be conscious of time. Take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team.