Technical Product Manager, Booking Services Search Group - Search Department (SED)

Job Description:

Business Overview
Rakuten is the biggest marketplace of Japan and is the largest internet ecosystem with wide range of services ranging from e-Commerce, Travel, Banking, Fintech, Golf, Insurance, Instant Messaging, Mobile Network etc. Rakuten has over 140 services globally. Our mission is to empower people and society through the internet while aiming at becoming the Global Innovation Company.
Rakuten’s technology organization has more than 2000 employees across Product Management, Research, Analytics, Product Development and Operations. Rakuten’s technical organization is responsible for building products that enable various business of Rakuten globally.

Department Overview
The Rakuten Search Department provides a powerful, customer-focused search engine to all the Rakuten Group services. This search engine is at confluence of supply and demand for each of the Rakuten Group businesses. Whenever a customer visits any Rakuten services and inputs in a query or browses through categories, our search engine is at work. We design, develop, and deploy high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search platform used by millions of Rakuten customers every day. Our Search Product Section works with various types of businesses within the Rakuten ecosystem.

Position:

Position Details
We are seeking a Technical Product Manager with an analytical mindset to spearhead the ongoing enhancement of our search user experience and functionality for services of Rakuten Group. This role involves developing and executing a product roadmap aimed at optimizing search functionalities, ensuring that our users can quickly find relevant products and information. A successful Product Manager in this position must be able to wear different hats and think like a customer, business owner, designer and enabler to deliver the best possible solution for a given problem and iterate. Willingness to challenge the status quo and abundant passion to get things done would be a must have for this position.

Key Responsibilities
Product Strategy & Roadmap:
- Own the Search platform roadmap and prioritization, balancing client needs, business impact, and technical risk
- Define Search feature strategy aligned with business goals and user needs
- Define and track success metrics and KPIs

Client Ownership & Requirements:
- Serve as the primary product and technical contact for clients
- Lead client onboarding, integrations, migrations, and platform adoption
- Translate business needs into PRDs, technical specifications, and acceptance criteria

Delivery & Program Execution:
- Own end-to-end delivery from requirement definition to launch
- Orchestrate execution across Business, Engineering, Data, and Operations
- Manage dependencies, risks, priorities, and timelines
- Ensure delivery meets SLAs and quality standards

Experimentation & Data:
- Drive A/B testing and experimentation for search relevance and performance
- Analyze data to improve relevance, performance, scalability, and reliability

Launch & Operations:
- Own launch planning, rollout, and post-launch monitoring

- Lead incident follow-ups and root-cause analysis when required

Stakeholder Communication:
- Communicate product direction, progress, and outcomes to stakeholders and leadership
- Partner with engineering on design decisions and trade-offs

Mandatory Qualifications:
Education & Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
- 3-5+ years of Product/Technical Product Management experience
- Experience with Search/Recommendation systems (e-commerce preferred)

Language & Communication:
- Fluent English (written and spoken)

- Fluent Japanese (written and spoken)
- Strong stakeholder communication skills, cross-functional collaboration and ownership mindset

Technical Skills:
- Product roadmapping, prioritization, and Agile delivery
- Data-driven decision making and experimentation
- Experience with Jira, Confluence, Notion, or similar tools

Desired Qualifications:
- Hands-on experience with search, recommendation, or analytics platforms
- Experience with platform, infrastructure, or internal developer products
- Exposure to ML/AI or data-intensive systems

- Engineering background or strong technical education
- Experience operating in global or highly scaled organizations

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