Senior Engineer, Core Services

Job Description:

Rakuten International oversees 7 businesses with over 4,000 employees globally. The brand is recognized for its leadership and innovation in e-commerce, digital content, advertising, entertainment and communications, bringing the joy of discovery and access to more than 1 billion members across the world. Our teams deliver on the company’s mission to delight merchants and customers through innovation, optimism, and teamwork.

Rakuten Viki is a global entertainment streaming platform that specializes in Asian content. Our platform enables millions of viewers to discover and enjoy primetime shows and movies, subtitled in over 150 languages. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, we also have offices in Singapore, Seoul, and Shanghai, ensuring a strong global presence and a deep connection to the heart of Asian entertainment. Our platform is home to a large and loyal community of fans who share a passion for Asian culture and entertainment. Join us in our mission to bridge cultures and connect the world to Asian entertainment. At Rakuten Viki, we offer a chance to be part of a global community that celebrates culture, creativity, and connection.

Based in Singapore, We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex technical problems and building scalable, reliable platforms. You will report to the Engineering Manager and play a key role in designing, building, and evolving backend systems that power Viki’s global streaming platform.

Our team is responsible for developing and maintaining large-scale distributed systems that support Viki’s core platform capabilities. These include services powering Viki’s APIs, business intelligence, user and communication systems, monetization and subscriptions, video encoding, content delivery, and other backend components critical to a global video streaming product.

Key Responsibilities:

Own multiple services or functional areas within a platform subsystem

Drive end-to-end delivery of features and technical initiatives, from design and development through testing, deployment, and post-release support

Design and implement high-quality, scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend systems

Evaluate technical complexity, trade-offs, and risks, and communicate them clearly to stakeholders

Troubleshoot production issues and act as a primary owner for the health and reliability of assigned services

Review code changes, provide actionable feedback, and uphold engineering quality standards

Contribute to architecture discussions, engineering guidelines, and backend best practices

Mentor junior engineers through technical guidance, code reviews, and knowledge sharing

Collaborate with cross-functional partners to deliver solutions aligned with product and business needs

Continuously improve system performance, observability, scalability, and developer productivity

Requirements:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

6–9 years of professional software engineering experience

Strong experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and microservices

Proficiency in at least one backend programming language such as Go, Node.js, Ruby, or Python

Solid experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and/or MySQL

Experience with messaging systems and caching technologies such as RabbitMQ and Redis

Experience working with cloud platforms such as GCP and/or AWS

Strong understanding of Linux/Unix systems, networking fundamentals, and backend performance considerations

Ability to independently drive technical projects and make sound engineering decisions in ambiguous environments

Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience building large-scale, high-traffic consumer products, including web and/or mobile applications

Experience with video streaming, media platforms, content delivery, or encoding systems

Experience improving service observability, reliability, and operational excellence

Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to team-wide engineering standards

Ability to quickly learn new technologies and apply them to solve challenging technical problems and gain insights from them

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.

Five Principles for Success

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen

Passionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best

Hypothesize - Practice - Validate – Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory

Maximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile

Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team