Software and Applications Manager

Rakuten Group, Inc. is the largest e-commerce company in Japan, and third largest e-commerce marketplace company worldwide, with over 1.5 billion registered users worldwide. The Rakuten brand is recognized worldwide for its leadership and innovation, and provides a variety of consumer and business-focused services including e-commerce, e-reading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. The company is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Western Europe, and the Americas.

Rakuten Viki is a premier global entertainment streaming site where millions of people discover and consume primetime shows and movies subtitled in more than 200 languages, by our community of fans. With billions of videos viewed and more than 1 billion words translated, Viki brings global entertainment to fans everywhere!

About the Product Services Group: The Product Services group comprises multiple backend engineering teams that develop and maintain services powering Viki's API and business workflows. We handle everything from Viki's content API, Identity & communication subsystems, Monetization & subscriptions, Content ingestion, publishing and management systems, and many other backend components critical to a video streaming platform. As we move towards enhancing personalized user experiences, we are forming a new team dedicated to improving the integration between our frontend and backend systems. This team will serve as a bridge between the frontend and backend, collaborating closely with both backend and frontend engineering teams to create a UI-focused API layer. The aim is to provide our users with faster, more tailored, and seamless experiences.

Position Overview: Reporting to the Senior Manager, Engineering, we are in search of a Backend Engineering Manager who can work in a fast-paced, professional environment. The ideal candidate will lead, mentor, and grow a team of talented backend engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of talented backend/full-stack engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.
• Recruit and onboard new engineering talent.
• Manage the day-to-day development of backend applications with a focus on quality and performance.
• Foster technical decision-making on the team, and make final decisions when necessary.
• Discern engineering metrics and seek to improve them.
• Focus on code quality, testability, and performance.
• Contribute technically through bug fixes, code reviews, and mentoring.
• Improve processes to make your team more effective.
• Focus on tooling and operational improvements.
• Institutionalize knowledge by developing or improving existing documentation.
• Plan and execute long-term strategies that benefit the team and the product in line with company OKRs.
• Build product features by following best practices around requirements analysis, validation, and delivery.
• Run, maintain, and improve the existing ecosystem for higher scale and reliability.

Requirements:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience managing or leading cross-functional engineering teams, ideally with exposure to both backend and frontend development.
• 9+ years of experience in building and delivering scalable, high-quality software solutions.
• Strong expertise in backend development with a focus on creating UI-centric API layers, including familiarity with frontend-backend integration patterns.
• Proven experience with backend development technologies, including relational and NoSQL databases, API development, and caching strategies.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), particularly in deploying microservices architectures and managing cloud-based infrastructure.
• Understanding of operational needs of production software (monitoring, deployment pipelines, testing).
• Passionate about building API and business logic for user-facing application clients.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience handling complete lifecycle development including technical direction around any of the following:
  • API design for multiple client teams.
  • Ability to go beyond features and consider reliability, performance, and security improvement of backend applications.
• Experience managing web or full stack applications, demonstrating a strong understanding of frontend technologies and their integration with backend systems.

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.