DevOps Engineer - Conversational Experiences Department (CXD)

Job Description:

Business Overview

Rakuten Group, Inc. 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 1.7 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has nearly 32,000 employees and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information, visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/

The AI & Data Division (AIDD) creates powerful, customer-focused search, recommendation, data science, advertising, marketing, price, and inventory optimization solutions for a variety of businesses across the Rakuten Group. As part of AIDD, the Conversational Experiences Department (CXD) focuses on AI for customer service. We build conversational AI products such as chatbots, voicebots, and copilot tools to support human operators.

Department Overview

You will join a 60-person AI for Customer Service team: engineers, TPMs, data analysts, dialogue designers: responsible for modernizing legacy contact-center tooling and workloads into an agentic Generative AI stack. We already power Rakuten Mobile’s pre-sale onboarding and support (“RMAA”) and are building the pipeline for customer service and engagement experience.

Now, we’re moving from a successful V1 into the scale-up phase: expanding to all 70 BUs and leveraging AI to multiply Rakuten’s core capabilities in e-commerce, finance, logistics, digital content, and beyond.

Position:

Why We Hire

As the CXD expands its AI-powered products and services across Rakuten Group, we need a skilled DevOps professional to build and operate the reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure behind them.

In this role, you will enable engineering and data teams to deliver AI solutions faster and more confidently by improving deployment automation, cloud operations, system observability, and platform reliability. Your work will directly support customer-facing services used across Rakuten’s global ecosystem.

Position Details

A full-time, mid-level (2-3 years) role requiring a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, working alongside senior engineers in a contributor capacity rather than a lead position.

Core focus is Kubernetes-based infrastructure and cloud-native services, with hands-on use of Docker, Kubernetes, one major cloud platform (AWS/GCP/Azure), CI/CD tools (Jenkins/GitLab CI), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Ansible), monitoring/logging tools (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK), and Python scripting.

The role includes participation in a 24/7 on-call rotation (incident response, postmortems, runbook upkeep), applying security and compliance practices to infrastructure and pipelines, and exposure to AIOps tooling and AI-driven operational insights - all while collaborating closely with software development teams and cross-functional/international stakeholders, for which mandatory written and verbal English proficiency is required.

Mandatory

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Minimum 2 years of experience in DevOps or related roles, with exposure to cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with containerization technologies, especially Docker and Kubernetes
• Understanding of CI/CD principles with experience using Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to troubleshoot in a distributed environment
• Good communication skills, able to work with cross-functional teams
• English proficiency (written and verbal) - explicitly stated as mandatory
• Japanese   Proficiency -   JLPT N2 or higher
• Desired

Qualifications:

• Familiarity with monitoring/logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or the ELK Stack (phrased as "familiarity," softer than the hands-on requirements above)
• Comfort with Python for scripting and basic data manipulation (phrased as "comfort with," not "hands-on experience")
• #engineer #infrastructureengineer #aianddatadiv