Senior Backend Engineer, AI-Driven Commerce Platform

Rakuten Asia Pte Ltd; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd., based in Singapore’s Central Business District, serves as the regional headquarters for Asia, driving value through analytics and data management to support Rakuten Group’s global ecosystem.

Our AI & Data Division builds agent-based systems that operate in live commerce environments, with a focus on safety and real-time performance. Join the AIDD team to design and deploy backend services for intent understanding, multi-turn task execution, and tool orchestration,

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production backend services; strong in Python (Go or Java a plus).
• Experience developing ML-based production systems — search, recommendation, ads ranking, personalization, or fraud/risk.
• Experience with high-traffic transactional or e-commerce backends: catalog, inventory, cart/checkout, payments, or order management.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-backed systems to production — not just API calls, but the infrastructure around them.

Responsibilities

• Build the backend services behind conversational and autonomous commerce agents.
• Own the commerce tool layer — catalog search, product detail, inventory and price lookup, cart, checkout, order status, returns.
• Design transactional safety for agent actions: idempotency, confirmation and rollback flows, spend and scope limits, permission models, and full audit trails for every action an agent takes.
• Build evaluation and observability for commerce outcomes — task success, recommendation relevance, cart and conversion impact, containment and escalation rates.
• Optimize latency and unit economics: retrieval and tool-call budgets, model routing, prompt caching, cost per resolved task.
• Work directly with commerce product, search/recsys, merchant platform, and trust & safety teams to ship agents through launch review into production.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

CI/CD

LLM-backed systems

Go

Java

IaC

Agent patterns

MLOps

Tools

Docker

Terraform

Job description

Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd., based in Singapore’s Central Business District, serves as the regional headquarters for Asia, driving value through analytics and data management to support Rakuten Group’s global ecosystem.

Our AI & Data Division builds agent-based systems that operate in live commerce environments, with a focus on safety and real-time performance. Join the AIDD team to design and deploy backend services for intent understanding, multi-turn task execution, and tool orchestration,