DevOps Engineer - Recommendation Department, AI & Data Division (AIDD)

Job Description:

Department Overview

Keep the engine behind Rakuten's personalized experiences fast, reliable and scalable.

The Recommendation Department is seeking a skilled DevOps Engineer to join our team based in Tokyo. The team, at the core of Rakuten's AI division, operates a platform that powers personalized recommendation experiences across Rakuten's diverse ecosystem of services through state-of-the-art AI algorithms, impacting millions of users daily. We are looking for an engineer with strong Linux, automation and cloud skills, and a passion for running large-scale, high-availability systems.

Our mission is to deliver recommendation as a product that maximizes user satisfaction through content personalization and discovery.

We support business growth by impacting millions of users, bridging user needs and technology leveraged by AI. We work closely with software and AI engineers to deliver the best solutions to our users, and we are passionate about the quality, reliability and continuous improvement of our platform.

Position:

Position Details

As a DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for operating and continuously improving the recommendation platform that supports many services and events across Rakuten Group. You will work closely with software engineers and data scientists to provide the highest service quality to our clients. You will improve how we package, deploy, monitor and scale the platform, with the goal of supporting real-time processing and worldwide deployment, and you will be a point of contact for other platform teams in Rakuten Group (e.g., Network and cloud teams).

<Your Mission>

・Operate our platform: administer and maintain our large-scale recommendation platform and support the team on production operations.

・Build and scale the infrastructure: design, implement and maintain scalable, highly available and fault-tolerant infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and on-premise environments.

・Automate everything: apply DevOps principles to automate packaging, deployment (CI/CD) and infrastructure management through infrastructure as code.

・Observe and improve reliability: implement and manage monitoring, logging and alerting solutions to ensure platform health and performance.

・Troubleshoot: investigate and resolve complex application, infrastructure and network issues in production.

・Collaborate: act as the team's point of contact for other platform teams in Rakuten Group, and work with engineers and data scientists to bring their models and services to production.

・Innovate: identify and advocate for new technologies and best practices that improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and reliability of our platform.

Work Environment

AI Product: Recommendation and Personalization (Recsys)

Cross-border team JP - EU (Japan - France/Spain/UK)

・Languages: Python, Groovy

・Cloud and infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linux, Docker, Kubernetes

・Automation: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code

・Monitoring and logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack

・Data: Spark, Kafka, NoSQL

Mandatory Qualifications:

・Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, System Administration or a related technical field.

・More than 5 years of experience in building, deploying and operating production-grade services.

・Strong experience with Linux systems and shell scripting.

・Experience with automation and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Chef).

・Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Cloud Build).

・Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

・Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, preferably GCP (More than 3 years).

・Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).

・Knowledge of distributed systems and high-availability architectures.

・Good understanding of networking fundamentals.

・Awareness of good development practices (pull requests, unit tests, continuous integration and delivery).

・Business-level communication skills in English, and the ability to work in an international, distributed team of senior engineers.

Desired Qualifications:

・Scripting or development experience in Python, Scala, Java or Ruby.

・Previous experience with Spark, Kafka, Couchbase or Redis.

・GCP Professional Cloud Engineer or equivalent certification.

・Contributions to open-source projects.

・Interest in data analytics, machine learning and personalization systems.

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