Associate Engineer/Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Company and Role Overview

Rakuten International operates seven businesses worldwide and employs over 4,000 personnel. Recognized for innovation and leadership across e-commerce, digital content, advertising, entertainment, and communications, it serves more than one billion members globally. Rakuten Viki, headquartered in San Mateo with offices in Singapore, Seoul, and Shanghai, provides a platform for streaming Asian entertainment content with subtitles in over 150 languages. The company fosters a vibrant community deeply connected to Asian culture and entertainment, and is committed to bridging cultures globally.

We are seeking an Associate Engineer/Engineer to join our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in Singapore, reporting to the SRE Manager. This team manages Viki’s large-scale, distributed backend systems, developing and optimizing services that power the platform's APIs and business intelligence, while maintaining scalability, reliability, and security.

About the SRE Team

The SRE team focuses on transitioning into a Platform and Performance Engineering model. They are creating an advanced framework for running agents securely at scale within sandboxed environments. Systems operate primarily on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and utilize AWS for media pipelines. Tools in use include Spinnaker, Cloudbuild, Datadog, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Redis.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement autonomous "agentic" infrastructure enabling AI agents to provision, configure, and maintain systems without manual intervention.
• Develop and maintain internal platforms that simplify infrastructure complexity and empower developers to self-serve securely and reliably.
• Lead and contribute to initiatives that elevate system performance and reliability via proactive, automated tuning.
• Collaborate with development teams to incorporate SRE best practices, embedding security, scalability, and cost efficiency into system architecture.
• Create lifecycle management agents to automate iterative tasks such as middleware upgrades, thereby reducing manual workload and accelerating deployment.
• Develop cutting-edge internal developer tools to enhance productivity.
• Participate in on-call rotations to uphold platform availability and utilize incident feedback to improve automation and guardrails.
• Continuously monitor system metrics to identify performance, cost, or security enhancements, and develop agentic responses or policy improvements accordingly.
• Integrate security within automated development cycles by building agents for vulnerability scanning, risk monitoring, and scalable remediation.

Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
• Minimum 2 years’ experience in SRE, DevOps, or backend development with demonstrated success in building scalable global systems. Strong software development fundamentals welcome recent graduates.
• Competent in software engineering with ability to write clean, maintainable code addressing complex infrastructure challenges.
• Solid knowledge of Linux/Unix operating systems and networking principles.
• Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes – GKE/EKS) and cloud platforms (GCP or AWS).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools.
• Understanding of application and infrastructure security basics.
• Interest in agent-based architectures and autonomous intelligent system development.
• Proactive ownership mentality with excellent collaboration skills in cross-functional teams.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Rakuten is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, age, sex, nationality, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

Core Principles at Rakuten

• Continuous improvement and achievement (Kaizen).
• Passionate professionalism aiming for excellence.
• Iterative hypothesis and validation process (Rakuten Cycle).
• Customer satisfaction as top priority.
• Emphasis on rapid execution and decisive leadership.