Senior Manager of Engineering - Travel Development Department, Commerce & Marketing Company Technology Supervisory Department
Rakuten
·Sep 12, 2025
- Location
- Rakuten Crimson House, Japan · Sumitomo Nakanoshima Building
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Seniority
- Senior
- Closing date
- Jun 4, 2026
- Source
- Workday
Description
Job Description:
Department Overview
Rakuten Travel is a leading online travel service in Japan, dedicated to “Making People Happy with Travel”.
Since our founding in 1996, we have consistently led the industry, challenging the norms and fostering innovation. With growing aspirations to expand beyond borders as a Global Innovation Company, we are not confined to Japan but continue to strive daily to become the world's premier travel reservation service.
The Travel Development Department (TDD), a key part of the Commerce & Marketing Company, is currently taking on the following ambitious projects:
- A global strategy to deliver the appeal of Rakuten Travel across borders to people around the world.
- Continuous improvement of service quality in the ever-evolving Japanese market.
To ensure the success of these projects, the presence of like-minded colleagues who share the same vision is essential. We are looking for individuals who resonate with Rakuten Travel's purpose and are eager to carve out a new future together.
Why not join Rakuten Travel in proposing new ways of traveling to people around the world and aim to become a pioneer in shaping the future of travel?
Your passion and creativity will bring a fresh breeze to the travel industry, which is full of infinite possibilities. We look forward to your application as you take on these grand challenges and grow together with your colleagues in a diverse environment.
Position:
Why We Hire
Travel Development Department (TDD) is currently operating with two primary missions:
- Maintaining and Improving Existing Systems: Ensuring the stable operation of our systems and driving revenue growth through functional enhancements, development, and operation of our existing systems, which serve over 100 million users.
- Building the Next-Generation Global Platform: Leading the renewal of our current systems with the goal of constructing a global platform for the future.
Rakuten Travel is expanding its services both domestically and internationally, and we are striving for even greater service enhancements in the future.
We are seeking a Senior Manager of Engineering to lead development projects, system operations, and organizational management/talent development across the PDM team, API Development team, Front End Development team, and Quality Assurance team.
We welcome applications from individuals who are eager to lead a team and take on the challenge of developing and operating large-scale Web systems.
Position Details
As a Senior Manager of Engineering, you will be expected to fulfill the following responsibilities:
- Section Management: Manage a section of 20-50 people, comprised of multiple groups (each group consisting of multiple teams of 5-10 members).
- Development Project Leadership: Lead committed development projects aligned with business growth, including schedule management and quality control.
- KPI Development and Execution: Create KPIs broken down from the overall Travel Development strategy to the section/group level, and formulate and execute plans to achieve them.
- Architectural Leadership: Serve as the architect for the systems/products under your organization's responsibility, validating new technologies and considering architectural trade-offs.
- System Ownership and Stability: As a system owner, consider and build the necessary process mechanisms to maintain the stability of production operations, and lead their practical implementation.
- Personnel and Hiring Planning: Develop and execute personnel and hiring plans for your organization.
- Organizational Management: Manage your organization's strategy, evaluations, and other organizational management tasks.
- Engineering Leadership Development: Educate and develop future engineering leaders through 1-on-1 meetings, HR tools, and other methods.
Development environment:
Java, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Cloud Config, JUnit, Apache Maven, IntelliJ IDEA
Middleware:
Oracle Database, Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kong, Nginx, Tomcat
Infrastructure:
Private cloud Rakuten IaaS (Virtual Machine), Docker, Kubernetes
Monitoring:
Jennifer (APM), New Relic (APM), ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Prometheus, Grafana, Oracle Enterprise Manager, MongoDB Ops Manager, PagerDuty
CI/CD:
Jenkins, SonarQube, Ansible
Others:
Microsoft Teams, Confluence, JIRA, BitBucket, etc.
Mandatory Qualifications:
- 7+ years of development experience in Web services/systems (Back-end or Front-end).
- 3+ years of management experience in a development organization (system development), including member evaluations and organizational strategy formulation.
- Business-level communication skills in Japanese.
- Experience in all development phases, project management, and post-release maintenance and operation.
- Ability to proactively formulate and execute strategies to advance the organization.
- Ability to make and propose logical decisions from both a short-term and medium-to-long-term perspective.
- Ability to propose and implement systems and processes to improve operational efficiency.
- Ability to effectively negotiate and coordinate with other departments and external partners.
- Ability to provide clear direction and lead a team and its members with a vision.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience in architectural design within the BtoB, BtoC, or travel industry.
- Data quantification and analysis skills.
- Strong logical thinking and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to develop persuasive arguments and influence others.
- Ability to overcome uncertainty and commitment to action.
- Experience with infrastructure and network design.
- Experience in budget management for a development organization.
- Experience in formulating and executing talent and recruitment strategies for a development organization.
- Experience in large-scale projects or development within international and diverse teams.
Other Information:
Additional information on Location
Rakuten Crimson House (Head Office)/Osaka Office
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