Job Description:
Rakuten International oversees 7 businesses with over 4,000 employees globally. The brand is recognized for its leadership and innovation in e-commerce, digital content, advertising, entertainment and communications, bringing the joy of discovery and access to more than 1 billion members across the world. Our teams deliver on the company's mission to delight merchants and customers through innovation, optimism, and teamwork.
Rakuten Rewards is a leading e-commerce company that enhances the way people shop by offering Cash Back, deals and rewards from more than 3,500 merchants. Founded in 1999, Rakuten has grown to become the go-to shopping destination for consumers, having paid out nearly $2 billion in Cash Back to its 15 million members. The company also operates ShopStyle, a leading fashion discovery destination, and Cartera Commerce, a top rewards platform for airlines and banks. For more information, visit www.rakuten.com.
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Job Summary:
We are seeking a visionary Principal Android Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strategic and market-oriented insights. In this role, you'll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to build elegant solutions that scale and perform reliably. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape the Android architecture and influence technical direction across squads. If you're passionate about groundbreaking technology, mentoring teams, and shaping the future of mobile commerce, we want you on our team.
Key Responsibilities:
- Strategic Engineering Leadership: Define and drive forward-thinking engineering strategies that align with our company's vision, ensuring that our mobile products not only meet market demands but also anticipate future trends. Enhance our competitive edge by leveraging market intelligence and external industry insights.
- External Innovation & Competitive Differentiation: Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and competitor offerings to identify new opportunities. Develop strategic roadmaps that integrate these insights, positioning our Android applications as market-leading differentiators in the e-commerce space.
- Technical Mentorship & Expert Guidance: Partner with iOS, backend, and web teams to create cohesive multi-platform solutions and opportunity to shape the Android architecture and influence technical direction across squads. Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and contribute to cross-functional initiatives.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration & Communication: Act as a bridge between squads, and other departments. Utilize engaging presentations, brown bag sessions, and comprehensive reports to clearly communicate progress, insights, and strategic direction to various stakeholders.
- Continuous Process Improvement: Lead initiatives to refine development processes, implementing agile and lean strategies that continually improve our operational efficiency and product quality.
Qualifications:
- Expert in Android SDK, Android Studio, Kotlin, and Java.
- Deep understanding of Android OS concepts, UI/UX and security best practices, and performance optimization.
- Strong knowledge of architectural patterns such as MVVM, MVP, or Clean Architecture.
- Experience with modularization, dependency injection (e.g., Dagger or Hilt), and reactive programming (e.g., RxJava, Coroutines).
- Experience building large-scale, event-driven architectures using tools like Event Bus, LiveData, RxJava, or Coroutines/Flows
- Expert with XML Views/Jetpack Compose.
- Strong background in Agile methodologies, continuous improvement, and process automation.
- Experience in coordinating with cross-functional teams to drive process improvements and ensure product quality.
- Expertise in writing robust, maintainable, and testable code. Experience with code reviews, debugging, unit testing (using frameworks like JUnit, Robolectric), and UI testing (using Espresso).
- Experience with global app deployments, feature flags, A/B testing, analytics and working in a monorepo environment
- Portfolio of published applications on GitHub and/or the Play Store.
- Strong problem-solving and communication skills.
- Experience with Design Systems.
- Knowledge of emerging technologies in mobile development is a plus.
Minimum Requirements:
- 12+ years of experience building native applications for Android devices.
- Bachelors or master's in computer science
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 provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.
At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation 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 discretionary bonus, health, vision, dental insurance, 401k matching, PTO, Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.
USD $156,007.50 - $291,500.00 annually