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 4,000 employees worldwide, Rakuten International’s portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications, and entertainment.
Job Summary:
Rakuten Rewards is seeking a highly skilled and forward‑thinking Staff Software Engineer to join our Bastion – Privacy team. This role is a critical technical leadership position responsible for building privacy‑first systems that comply with global privacy regulations while leveraging AI‑assisted engineering practices across the full software development lifecycle.
You will set the technical bar for privacy‑focused platforms, mentor engineers, and champion AI‑enabled development, testing, peer review, and documentation to improve velocity, code quality, and system safety—without compromising security or compliance.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership & Architecture
Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, secure, privacy‑by‑design systems supporting global regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
Drive architectural decisions for systems handling sensitive data, ensuring data minimization, purpose limitation, and defensible controls are embedded from design through runtime.
Conduct and lead privacy impact assessments (PIAs) and threat modeling, incorporating AI‑assisted analysis to identify design risks earlier and more consistently.
AI‑Enabled Engineering Practices
Leverage AI tools as a standard part of daily development, including:
AI‑assisted code generation, refactoring, and optimization.
AI‑driven peer review to identify logical errors, security flaws, privacy risks, and anti‑patterns before human review.
AI‑supported testing (unit, integration, privacy‑focused test generation).
AI‑assisted documentation, design reasoning, and data‑flow explanations.
Establish guardrails and best practices for safe, responsible use of AI in engineering to ensure no leakage of sensitive data, source code, or regulated information.
Continuously evaluate emerging AI‑based 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 well‑scoped, iterative deliverables with privacy and security requirements embedded throughout the SDLC.
Design, build, and maintain services supporting user data rights automation (access, deletion, correction, restriction).
Champion automated quality gates (security scans, privacy checks, dependency analysis) within CI/CD pipelines, augmented by AI‑driven signal analysis.
Proactively identify and remediate privacy risks, security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and scale limitations using both human expertise and AI‑assisted 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 mid‑level engineers, teaching:
Secure and privacy‑centric coding practices.
Responsible, effective use of AI for development and review.
How to reason about risk, tradeoffs, and long‑term maintainability.
Set expectations for high‑quality peer review, combining AI‑assisted reviews with thoughtful human oversight.
Operational Excellence
Participate in on‑call rotations and incident response, restoring service reliability while maintaining data privacy and security guarantees.
Use post‑incident reviews and AI‑assisted log/trace analysis to drive systemic improvements.
Qualifications:
Bachelor’s or Master’s 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 systems‑level thinking.
Solid written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining complex technical and privacy concepts.
Minimum Requirements:
Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and JPA.
Extensive experience with AWS, including S3, SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, and IAM.
Hands‑on experience building and deploying microservices using Docker and Kubernetes.
Demonstrated experience using AI tools to augment software development, including code generation, review, testing, or documentation.
Strong understanding of data privacy regulations and principles (GDPR, CCPA; HIPAA a plus).
Experience implementing encryption, anonymization, and pseudonymization techniques.
Experience with secure coding practices, vulnerability analysis, and automated security tooling.
Working knowledge of OLTP databases (Postgres/MySQL) and OLAP platforms (e.g., Snowflake).
Experience with distributed systems components (Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, or similar).
Proven ability to design and implement modern architectural patterns (microservices, event‑driven systems).
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across a team.
Familiarity with Agile delivery methodologies (Scrum, Kanban).
Preferred Requirements:
Experience in highly regulated industries (Fintech, Healthcare, Payments).
Experience with identity and access management (IAM) platforms beyond basic AWS IAM.
Advanced experience conducting PIAs, data flow mapping, and threat modeling.
Demonstrated experience establishing AI‑assisted engineering standards or developer enablement practices.
Relevant certifications such as CIPP, CISSP, or equivalent.
Contributions to privacy‑ or security‑focused open‑source projects.
Experience presenting technical and risk concepts to legal, 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 Rakuten.com.
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: https://rakutenemploymentalert.com/
At 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.