Software Engineer, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software), DevOps

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, Rakuten International’s portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications, and entertainment.

Rakuten Rewards is seeking a highly skilled and forward‑thinking Staff Software Engineer to join our Bastion – Privacy team. This role is a critical technical leadership position responsible for building privacy‑first systems that comply with global privacy regulations while leveraging AI‑assisted engineering practices across the full software development lifecycle. You will set the technical bar for privacy‑focused platforms, mentor engineers, and champion AI‑enabled development, testing, peer review, and documentation to improve velocity, code quality, and system safety—without compromising security or compliance.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, secure, privacy‑by‑design systems supporting global regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
• Drive architectural decisions for systems handling sensitive data, ensuring data minimization, purpose limitation, and defensible controls are embedded from design through runtime.
• Conduct and lead privacy impact assessments (PIAs) and threat modeling, incorporating AI‑assisted analysis to identify design risks earlier and more consistently.

AI‑Enabled Engineering Practices

• Leverage AI tools as a standard part of daily development, including:
  • AI‑assisted code generation, refactoring, and optimization.
  • AI‑driven peer review to identify logical errors, security flaws, privacy risks, and anti‑patterns before human review.
  • AI‑supported testing (unit, integration, privacy‑focused test generation).
  • AI‑assisted documentation, design reasoning, and data‑flow explanations.
  • Establish guardrails and best practices for safe, responsible use of AI in engineering to ensure no leakage of sensitive data, source code, or regulated information.
  • Continuously evaluate emerging AI‑based engineering tools and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines where they measurably improve quality, consistency, or delivery speed.

Software Development & Delivery

• Break down complex initiatives into well‑scoped, iterative deliverables with privacy and security requirements embedded throughout the SDLC.
• Design, build, and maintain services supporting user data rights automation (access, deletion, correction, restriction).
• Champion automated quality gates (security scans, privacy checks, dependency analysis) within CI/CD pipelines, augmented by AI‑driven signal analysis.
• Proactively identify and remediate privacy risks, security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and scale limitations using both human expertise and AI‑assisted analysis.

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Partner closely with Product, Legal, Privacy, and Security teams to translate regulatory and business requirements into technically sound implementations.
• Mentor junior and mid‑level engineers, teaching:
  • Secure and privacy‑centric coding practices.
  • Responsible, effective use of AI for development and review.
  • How to reason about risk, tradeoffs, and long‑term maintainability.
• Set expectations for high‑quality peer review, combining AI‑assisted reviews with thoughtful human oversight.

Operational Excellence

• Participate in on‑call rotations and incident response, restoring service reliability while maintaining data privacy and security guarantees.
• Use post‑incident reviews and AI‑assisted log/trace analysis to drive systemic improvements.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including leadership roles on complex systems.
• Strong analytical ability and systems‑level thinking.
• Solid written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining complex technical and privacy concepts.

• Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and JPA.
• Extensive…