Head of AI Science for LLMs, RAG & Conversations

Rakuten; Singapore; On-site; SGD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd.

in Singapore's CBD leads the applied AI science function within Rakuten’s CXD team, managing a team of data scientists and ML engineers responsible for the intelligence layer of our conversational AI platform. Based in Singapore and working closely with product and engineering counterparts across Japan and the wider APAC region, you will set the technical direction, build team capability, and drive measurable improvement across model quality, retrieval performance, and

Qualifications

• 7+ years in applied ML or NLP with 3+ years in leadership.
• PhD preferred; equivalent industry experience considered.
• Hands-on with LLMs and RAG in production and retrieval pipelines.
• Ability to sign off on system design decisions with math and theory.
• Experience with agentic reasoning evaluation and multi-step orchestration.
• Strong Python and cloud ML infra skills; vector search familiarity.
• Excellent communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead data science team; set scientific roadmap for Runtime and Learning planes.
• Own end-to-end LLM strategy, lifecycle, and model upgrades.
• Advance RAG architecture; drive retrieval quality and knowledge management.
• Define offline/online evaluation; enforce rigorous experimentation.
• Design memory, context, and user profiling at scale with compliance.
• Drive personalisation for upsell and conversion with measurable impact.

Skills

ML Leadership

Applied ML/NLP

LLMs & RAG

Experimentation

Python & Cloud

Stakeholder comms

Cross-region collab

Hiring & mentoring

Problem framing

Architectural sign-off

Education

PhD in CS/ML/NLP

Industry-equivalent exp

Tools

Vector search

Embeddings models

GCP

Job description

Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd.

in Singapore's CBD leads the applied AI science function within Rakuten’s CXD team, managing a team of data scientists and ML engineers responsible for the intelligence layer of our conversational AI platform. Based in Singapore and working closely with product and engineering counterparts across Japan and the wider APAC region, you will set the technical direction, build team capability, and drive measurable improvement across model quality, retrieval performance, and