Job Description:
Department Overview
The EC Expansion Development Department is guided by a mindset of building a lean and efficient organization, and delivers products and systems that continuously strengthen and expand e-commerce. In a fast-changing business environment, we actively leverage AI and other advanced technologies to deliver value at speed, growing as a team through ongoing challenges and continuous improvement.
Among these, the Marketplace Expansion Development Section develops and operates services such as the J.League Online Store, Furusato Nozei (Hometown Tax), Rakken, and RAXY. Additionally, the team is responsible for launching new EC-related services with the goal of expanding and growing Rakuten's marketplace. This is a highly challenging department where you can gain unique and valuable experiences that are distinct to Rakuten.
Position:
Why We Hire
We are seeking a people-focused DevOps Engineering Manager to lead our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) team.
The primary mission of this role is to empower our engineers, support their career growth, and maintain operational excellence in our cloud infrastructure. While hands-on technical work is not required, a strong conceptual understanding of cloud-native architecture is essential to effectively lead the team, manage budgets, and oversee critical operational processes.
Position Details
- Proposing solutions aligned with business requirements, and designing and implementing scalable GCP infrastructure and automated CI/CD pipelines.
- People Leadership: Manage engineer performance, set clear individual and team goals, and provide consistent coaching to support long-term career growth.
- Operational Excellence: Oversee ITSM processes, manage on-call schedules, and serve as the primary escalation point for critical incidents.
- Strategic Unblocking: Identify and remove technical or organizational blockers, ensuring the team can deliver high-quality work efficiently.
- Financial Stewardship: Manage the infrastructure budget, implementing FinOps strategies to reduce GCP costs without compromising performance or reliability.
- Process Innovation: Propose and implement new best practices for software delivery, incident response, and team collaboration.
Work Environment
In our group, engineers with various background from all over the world are working as one team.
Development Environment
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Docker, Google Kubernetes Engine, Terraform, Terragrunt, GitHub, Python, Kafka, Go, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Databases (NoSQL)
Mandatory Qualifications:
Core Technical & Cloud Requirements
- Experience: Over 3 years of experience in a leadership or management role within a DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) environment.
- Conceptual Technical Knowledge: Strong understanding of GCP services (GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub), CI/CD methodologies, cloud security, and networking.
- Operational Background: Proven experience with ITSM frameworks (Incident, Problem, and Change Management) and managing on-call rotations.
- Financial Acumen: Experience managing cloud budgets and a track record of implementing cost-optimization initiatives (FinOps).
- Project Management: Ability to translate business needs into technical tasks and guide the team through successful execution.
- Communication: Exceptional communication skills to bridge the gap between technical engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Soft Skills & Leadership
- Servant Leadership: A "people-first" mindset focused on supporting the team's well-being and productivity.
- Conflict Resolution: Ability to handle high-pressure situations and escalations with a calm, solution-oriented approach.
- Visionary Thinking: Ability to suggest new ideas and best practices that contribute to the long-term evolution of the department.
- Cultural Competence: Experience leading and collaborating within diverse, multicultural, and global teams.
Desired Qualifications:
- Deep SRE Understanding: Strong grasp of SRE principles, specifically defining SLI/SLOs, managing error budgets, and toil reduction.
- Large-scale Cost Optimization: Experience leading large-scale cloud cost reduction projects or holding a FinOps certification.
- Agile/Scrum: Experience leading teams using Agile or Scrum methodologies and advanced proficiency in project management tools (Jira, Confluence, etc.).
- Technical Background: Prior hands-on experience as an engineer in development or infrastructure (to better understand the team's technical challenges).
- Culture Building: Experience fostering engineering culture and promoting DevOps best practices across an organization.
- ITSM Tooling: Experience selecting and implementing incident management and ITSM tools such as PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or ServiceNow.
Other Information:
Additional information on Location
Rakuten Crimson House (Head office)
Additional information on English Qualification
TOEIC Score exceeding 800 (or similar level of English ability) or a University Degree earned in an English-speaking country.
Proof of qualifications will be required by the time of the job offer.
If no evidence is available to prove the qualifications denoted above, taking an IP test, organized by Rakuten, during selection process is required.
#engineer #infrastructureengineer #commerce #Python
Languages:
English (Overall - 3 - Advanced), Japanese (Overall - 4 - Fluent)