AI Architect - AI Management & Governance Section, Global IT Strategy Office

Job Description:

Business Overview

Rakuten Group has more than 30,000 employees and contingent workers globally, providing global, cross-border and localized services in more than 30 countries around the world.

Department Overview

The Global IT Strategy Office under the Corporate IT Supervisory Department is uniquely situated to work on strategic corporate IT initiatives that affect all employees worldwide. We work as a global organization across multiple regions and time zones to deliver solutions to empower employees through providing business-relevant IT solutions and services, while safeguarding critical information assets of Rakuten Group.

The mission of the AI Management & Governance Section is to provide frameworks, guardrails, guidance and solutions necessary to govern the end-to-end AI lifecycle across the enterprise, ensuring all AI initiatives are ethical, secure and aligned with our core business values.

Position:

Why We Hire

The AI Management & Governance Section is a new organization that is situated to develop AI design framework and governance within the IT organization.

Position Details

- Solution Design: Design scalable, efficient, practical and business-driven solutions and blueprints for AI solutions including AI agents and any related system, ensuring alignment with the overarching architectural vision, including data flows, API integrations, etc.

- Design Documentations: Deliver design documents, diagrams and implementation recommendations while participating in requirements gathering, design and test phases of AI projects.

- AI Architecture, Governance and Management: Design and take ownership of architectural standards for security, performance, scalability, and safety of AI solutions in the corporate IT environment.

- Technical Problem Solving: Provide expert-level troubleshooting for complex architectural and integration challenges faced by engineers.

- Proof of Concepts (POCs) & Prototyping: Research, identify, shortlist and test through hands-on setup of proof-of-concepts and test environments for new AI  capabilities to validate feasibility.

- Collaboration and Mentorship: Collaborate with engineering and operations, offer technical guidance and mentorship to engineers to help them effectively implement architectural principles and ensure solutions are scalable, stable, security and operationally sustainable.

Mandatory Qualifications:

- A good bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, data science, or related field, or equivalent experience that facilitates sufficient understanding in concepts of computing, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence principles.

- Proven experience as an AI Architect, at least 2 years as an AI engineer at a role of senior level in delivering AI solutions in an enterprise setting or at least 2 years of research experience directly relate to the usage in AI in an enterprise setting.

- Experience with programming languages, such as Java, Python, R.

- Experience with cloud computing platforms for model deployment, scaling and agentic AI platforms, such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

- Experience with developing, utilizing and integrating APIs with AI applications and AI into existing applications using tools such as MuleSoft API Manager, Google Apigee.

- Familiarity with modern AI protocols and necessary components to develop, deploy and manage related implementations, such as A2A, MCP.

- Familiarity with configuring, deployment and management of generative AI solutions, such as Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI.

- Familiarity with AI application and agentic solutions, such as Dify, n8n and Power Automate platform.

- Good understanding of security, monitoring, high availability and disaster recovery principles to apply consistently to system design activity, create design guidance and provide feedback in the corporate policy making process.

- Strong written and verbal communication and presentation skills and being able to communicate effectively with other team members, other departments/teams or management in a technical and non-technical manner.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, and adaptive to new challengesand show strong desire to learn and explore new and cutting-edge technologies.

- Ability to work as a team player for larger projects and individually with minimal supervision while under pressure to meet tight deadlines.

- Demonstrated track record working in an international setting, being a team member within a team from various cultural backgrounds, working in different geographic locations and time zones.

Desired Qualifications:

- Previous experience as an IT application or infrastructure architect or engineer.

- Ability to independently build a full stack corporate environment to test drive a product or execute PoC.

- Current CISSP, CompTIA Security+ or equivalent security certifications.

- Relevant enterprise architecture framework certification (e.g. TOGAF, OpenCA, CEA Black Belt, ITIL, etc.).

- Relevant Information Processing Safety Supporter Qualification (e.g. Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, AWS, Okta, etc.).

- Business Level Japanese (JLPT N3 level or higher and can communicate in a business setting).

Other Information:

Additional information on Location

This role will be based our Tokyo Headquarters and requires to be on-site at least 4 days a week (subject to change any time).

Additional information on English Qualification

At least business level English is a must

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#Java

Languages:

English (Overall - 3 - Advanced), Japanese (Overall - 2 - Intermediate)