Staff Software Engineer

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 4000 employees worldwide Rakuten Internationals portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce digital marketing advertising communications and entertainment.

Job Summary:

Rakuten Rewards is seeking a highly skilled and forwardthinkingStaff Software Engineerto join ourBastion Privacyteam. This role is a critical technical leadership position responsible for building privacyfirst systems that comply with global privacy regulations while leveragingAIassisted engineering practices across the full software development lifecycle.

You will set the technical bar for privacyfocused platforms mentor engineers andchampion AIenabled development testing peer review and documentationto improve velocity code quality and system safetywithout compromising security or compliance.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead the design development and evolution ofscalable secure privacybydesign systemssupporting global regulations (e.g. GDPR CCPA).

• Drive architectural decisions for systems handling sensitive data ensuringdata minimization purpose limitation and defensible controlsare embedded from design through runtime.

• Conduct and leadprivacy impact assessments (PIAs)and threat modeling incorporating AIassisted analysis to identify design risks earlier and more consistently.

AIEnabled Engineering Practices

• Leverage AI tools as a standard part of daily development including:

  • AIassisted code generation refactoring and optimization.

  • AIdriven peer review to identify logical errors security flaws privacy risks and antipatterns before human review.

  • AIsupported testing (unit integration privacyfocused test generation).

  • AIassisted documentation design reasoning and dataflow explanations.

  • Establishguardrails and best practicesfor safe responsible use of AI in engineering to ensure no leakage of sensitive data source code or regulated information.

  • Continuously evaluate emerging AIbased 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 wellscoped iterative deliverables with privacy and security requirements embedded throughout the SDLC.

• Design build and maintain services supportinguser data rights automation(access deletion correction restriction).

• Championautomated quality gates(security scans privacy checks dependency analysis) within CI/CD pipelines augmented by AIdriven signal analysis.

• Proactively identify and remediateprivacy risks security vulnerabilities performance bottlenecks and scale limitationsusing both human expertise and AIassisted 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 midlevel engineers teaching:

  • Secure and privacycentric coding practices.

  • Responsible effective use of AI for development and review.

  • How to reason about risk tradeoffs and longterm maintainability.

• Set expectations forhighquality peer review combining AIassisted reviews with thoughtful human oversight.

Operational Excellence

• Participate in oncall rotations and incident response restoring service reliability while maintaining data privacy and security guarantees.

• Use postincident reviews and AIassisted log/trace analysis to drive systemic improvements.

Qualifications:

• Bachelors or Masters 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 systemslevel thinking.

• Solid written and verbal communication skills especially when explaining complex technical and privacy concepts.

Minimum Requirements:

• Strong proficiency inJava Spring Boot and JPA.

• Extensive experience withAWS including S3 SQS Lambda DynamoDB and IAM.

• Handson experience building and deployingmicroservicesusing Docker and Kubernetes.

• Demonstrated experienceusing AI tools to augment software development including code generation review testing or documentation.

• Strong understanding ofdata privacy regulations and principles(GDPR CCPA; HIPAA a plus).

• Experience implementingencryption anonymization and pseudonymizationtechniques.

• Experience withsecure coding practices vulnerability analysis and automated security tooling.

• Working knowledge ofOLTP databases(Postgres/MySQL) andOLAP platforms(e.g. Snowflake).

• Experience with distributed systems components (Kafka Redis Elasticsearch or similar).

• Proven ability to design and implementmodern architectural patterns(microservices eventdriven systems).

• Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across a team.

• Familiarity withAgile delivery methodologies(Scrum Kanban).

Preferred Requirements:

• Experience inhighly regulated industries(Fintech Healthcare Payments).

• Experience withidentity and access management (IAM)platforms beyond basic AWS IAM.

• Advanced experience conductingPIAs data flow mapping and threat modeling.

• Demonstrated experienceestablishing AIassisted engineering standards or developer enablement practices.

• Relevant certifications such asCIPP CISSP or equivalent.

• Contributions to privacy or securityfocused opensource projects.

• Experience presenting technical and risk concepts tolegal compliance and executive stakeholders.

Rakuten is the most rewarding way to shop giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel beauty and wellness grocery travel on-demand services subscriptions and dining helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999 Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind. Learn more at .

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

Rakuten is an equal opportunity employer. Accessibility accommodations for candidates with disabilities participating in the selection process are available on request. Any information received related to accommodation needs of applicants will be addressed confidentially.

Rakuten would like to thank all applicants for their interest in this role however only qualified candidates will be shortlisted.

Beware of fraudulent job offers claiming to be from Rakuten. Rakuten does not send unsolicited job offers or request money during the recruitment process. Learn more: the time of posting Rakuten expects the Compensation (base salary discretionary bonus) for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors including the skills qualifications and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for stock options health vision dental insurance RRSP matching Personal Time Off (PTO) Volunteer Time Off (VTO) and other employee benefits as the company implements.