Platform Engineer

Job Description:

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community.

Rakuten is the most rewarding way to shop, giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform, Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty and wellness, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscriptions, and dining, helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999, Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind.

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You will help engineering squads adopt AI agent skills and use them daily to build better software, faster. You will act as their embedded expert, a forward-deployed engineer for AI agent skills, showing them how to use these tools, fixing issues, and closing gaps as they come up. Alongside that, you will also own core platform work: infrastructure, CI/CD, and quality engineering, keeping the systems squads depend on reliable and well-tested.

You will be based in San Mateo, working closely with your manager for direct mentorship as you grow across our stack.

• Acts as the embedded, forward-deployed engineer for AI tooling: finds slow or manual points in a squad's dev lifecycle, closes them with AI-powered solutions, and champions AI coding assistants and agents across the org.
• Designs and integrates agentic and multi-agent AI systems (Lang Chain, Agent SDK, MCP) and external AI services (Anthropic, OpenAI, and others) into internal tools and squad workflows.
• Strengthens quality through unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, using AI to generate and maintain coverage faster and resolve issues quickly.
• Builds back-end services, APIs, and lightweight front-end components across the team's stack (Java, Python, Golang, React), ensuring proper integration within existing infrastructure.
• Designs and manages data schemas and databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Kafka) for efficient storage and retrieval.
• Builds and improves CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, and internal developer platform capabilities (templates, self-service infra) that squads depend on.
• Acquires foundational knowledge of system engineering principles and practices relevant to assigned projects.
• Analyzes basic system requirements and participates in the preparation of technical specifications.
• Applies learned concepts to assist in system design and implementation for limited-scope projects.
• Communicates progress and findings to team members and stakeholders during project reviews.
• Coordinates with cross-functional teams to align tasks with project timelines and deliverables.
• Develops basic documentation to support system architecture and implementation processes.
• Escalates technical challenges or unresolved issues to senior engineers for guidance and resolution.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs and AI agents, and comfort with cloud AI services (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar on AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Practical experience building agentic systems:
  Agent Skills, MCP (Model Context Protocol), and multi-agent workflows using frameworks like Lang Chain or Agent SDK.
• A grasp of AI fundamentals: why models fail, hallucinations, grounding, and evaluation-driven development.
• An automation-first instinct and a system design mindset, reasoning about tradeoffs and not just writing code.
• 1-3 years building products end-to-end, from design through production deployment; strong, relevant internships also count.
• Solid programming fundamentals in at least one of Java, Python, Golang, or React, plus Git and collaborative development practices.
• Comfort working across the full stack rather…