Engineering Manager

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.

About the Product Services Group: The Product Services group comprises multiple backend engineering teams that develop and maintain services powering Viki's API and business workflows. We handle everything from Viki's content API, Identity & communication subsystems, Monetization & subscriptions, Content ingestion, publishing and management systems, and many other backend components critical to a video streaming platform. As we move towards enhancing personalized user experiences, we are forming a new team dedicated to improving the integration between our frontend and backend systems. This team will serve as a bridge between the frontend and backend, collaborating closely with both backend and frontend engineering teams to create a UI-focused API layer. The aim is to provide our users with faster, more tailored, and seamless experiences.

Position Overview: Reporting to the Senior Manager, Engineering, we are in search of a Backend Engineering Manager who can work in a fast-paced, professional environment. The ideal candidate will lead, mentor, and grow a team of talented backend engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of talented backend/full-stack engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.
• Recruit and onboard new engineering talent.
• Manage the day-to-day development of backend applications with a focus on quality and performance.
• Foster technical decision-making on the team, and make final decisions when necessary.
• Discern engineering metrics and seek to improve them.
• Focus on code quality, testability, and performance.
• Contribute technically through bug fixes, code reviews, and mentoring.
• Improve processes to make your team more effective.
• Focus on tooling and operational improvements.
• Institutionalize knowledge by developing or improving existing documentation.
• Plan and execute long-term strategies that benefit the team and the product in line with company OKRs.
• Build product features by following best practices around requirements analysis, validation, and delivery.
• Run, maintain, and improve the existing ecosystem for higher scale and reliability.
  
  

Requirements:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience managing or leading cross-functional engineering teams, ideally with exposure to both backend and frontend development.
• 9+ years of experience in building and delivering scalable, high-quality software solutions.
• Strong expertise in backend development with a focus on creating UI-centric API layers, including familiarity with frontend-backend integration patterns.
• Proven experience with backend development technologies, including relational and NoSQL databases, API development, and caching strategies.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), particularly in deploying microservices architectures and managing cloud-based infrastructure.
• Understanding of operational needs of production software (monitoring, deployment pipelines, testing).
• Passionate about building API and business logic for user-facing application clients.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience handling complete lifecycle development including technical direction around any of the following:
• API design for multiple client teams.
• Ability to go beyond features and consider reliability, performance, and security improvement of backend applications.
• Experience managing web or full stack applications, demonstrating a strong understanding of frontend technologies and their integration with backend systems.
  

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.