Senior Engineer, Core Services

About Rakuten Viki and Role Overview

Rakuten International is a global leader in diverse industries including e-commerce, digital content, and entertainment, with over 4,000 employees worldwide and more than a billion members. Rakuten Viki, based in San Mateo with major offices in Singapore, Seoul, and Shanghai, specializes in streaming Asian entertainment content subtitled in over 150 languages. We foster a vibrant community passionate about Asian culture. This role, located in Singapore, is for a Senior Backend Engineer to architect, develop, and enhance backend systems crucial to Viki's global video streaming platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and own several services or specific functional areas within platform subsystems.
• Lead full lifecycle feature delivery from design through deployment and support.
• Architect scalable, maintainable, and high-quality backend systems.
• Assess technical complexities, trade-offs, and risks, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.
• Investigate and resolve production issues, ensuring assigned service reliability and health.
• Perform code reviews and maintain engineering quality standards.
• Engage in architecture discussions and promote backend best practices and guidelines.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to junior engineers.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop solutions aligned with business and product goals.
• Drive ongoing improvements in system scalability, performance, observability, and developer efficiency.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 6 to 9 years of professional experience in software engineering.
• Proven expertise in designing, building, and operating large distributed systems and microservices.
• Proficiency in backend programming languages such as Go, Node.js, Ruby, or Python.
• Experience with relational databases like PostgreSQL and/or MySQL.
• Knowledge of messaging systems and caching technologies, specifically RabbitMQ and Redis.
• Background working with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and AWS.
• Strong understanding of Linux/Unix systems, networking principles, and backend system performance.
• Ability to independently drive technical projects and make well-informed engineering decisions amid uncertainties.
• Excellent communication skills with effectiveness in cross-team collaboration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in developing large-scale, high-traffic consumer-facing web or mobile applications.
• Experience with video streaming, media content delivery, or video encoding systems.
• Expertise in improving service observability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to engineering standards across teams.
• Capacity to rapidly grasp and implement new technologies to solve complex technical challenges.

Commitment to Diversity and Workplace Culture

Rakuten fosters equal employment opportunities inclusive of all protected characteristics under applicable laws and strives to build a welcoming environment. We embrace five core principles shaping our culture: continuous improvement (Kaizen), professionalism, iterative learning (Shikumika), customer satisfaction prioritization, and a strong emphasis on speed and decisiveness.