Rakuten International is a global technology leader that offers a variety of services to empower individuals and businesses. They are seeking innovative and driven Early Career AI Engineers to join their core AI User Experience team, focusing on building AI experiences that enhance customer service and engagement across their platform.
Responsibilities
• AI Product Development: Design, build, and maintain features for AI-driven web applications and services (front-end and back-end).
• GenAI Integration: Develop and integrate agentic AI frameworks using cutting-edge tools and SDKs, such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenChat’s ChatCompletion, and Agent SDK. Leverage LLMs to create innovative user experiences.
• Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, UX designers, and global engineering teams (US, Japan and beyond), adapting to multi-cultural and distributed work environments.
• API & Data Management: Design, implement, and manage robust RESTful APIs and data schemas that are critical for the production readiness of enterprise applications—ensuring secure, reliable, and scalable systems that can power AI-driven customer experiences at global scale. Manage relational and NoSQL databases to support real-time and batch AI workloads.
• Testing & Optimization: Write unit and integration tests, debug code, and optimize performance for scalability and reliability.
• Continuous Learning: Stay current with GenAI and LLM trends, propose new ideas, and drive implementation.
Skills
• Strong coding skills in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or similar languages
• Familiarity with front-end frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) and back-end development
• Solid understanding of data schema design and hands-on experience with SQL/NoSQL databases
• Demonstrated ability to work in multicultural environments
• Flexibility to adjust working hours for collaboration with teams in Japan (some early morning or evening meetings as needed)
• Strong ownership mindset, able to deliver high-quality results with minimal supervision
• Bias for action and a track record of shipping projects from idea to completion
• Experience or internship in AI for customer service, conversational AI, or related domains
• Recent Graduation: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related major (graduation by August/September 2025 or earlier)
• Hands-on project or internship experience with Generative AI, LLMs (OpenAI, Google, open-source, etc.)
• Contributions to open-source AI/LLM projects or Kaggle/ML competitions
• Exposure to cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Company Overview
• In Japanese, Rakuten stands for “optimism.” It means we are hopeful for the future and believe we can make tomorrow better by what we do today. It was founded in 1997, and is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees. Its website is http://rakuten.us.
Company H1B Sponsorship
• Rakuten International has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 5 in 2025, 7 in 2024, 8 in 2023, 19 in 2022, 15 in 2021, 23 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.
