Group Product Manager

Rakuten Kobo Inc.; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 132,000 - 227,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Health insurance

Vision & dental insurance

401k matching

PTO

Volunteer Time Off (VTO)

Job summary

Rakuten Rewards is seeking a Group Product Manager to own the Merchant Measurement data infrastructure end‑to‑end. You will standardize impressions data, validate performance with benchmarking, and productize incrementality testing at scale while leading a small team of PMs who execute the roadmap.

This role reports to the SVP of Product Management and requires close collaboration with engineering, data science, commercial, and legal.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product management experience in data infrastructure, ML platform, or AI product roles.
• Bachelor's Degree required; Master’s Degree preferred.
• Nice to have background in economics, statistics, CS, or quantitative discipline.
• Familiarity with LLM-based productivity tooling and enterprise AI adoption patterns.
• Prior work in commerce, affiliate, or partner marketing environments.

Responsibilities

• Own Rakuten Rewards' data infrastructure product strategy for signals across member, merchant, and partner surfaces in real time.
• Standardize impressions and merchant measurement products as the single source of truth for downstream measurement and reporting.
• Lead unified member and merchant profiles powering personalization, recommendations, and targeting.
• Lead the ML platform strategy, enabling data science and engineering to build, experiment, deploy, and monitor models at scale.
• Enable incrementality testing across top merchants and collaborate with third‑party measurement platforms.
• Define and deliver a self‑serve, cloud‑agnostic merchant data hub with scalable data governance.
• Serve as internal Data and AI product strategy authority across reviews, planning, and evaluations.
• Drive alignment across engineering, data science, and commercial teams to unblock work.

Skills

Data infrastructure

ML platform

AI product leadership

Cross-functional leadership

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree preferred

Job description

Job Description

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community. Rakuten is the most rewarding way to shop, giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform, Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty and wellness, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscriptions, and dining, helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999, Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind. Learn more at Rakuten.com.

Job Summary

Rakuten Rewards is building the measurement infrastructure that defines how we prove — and grow — our value with merchants. We are looking for a Group Product Manager to own the Merchant Measurement product agenda end-to-end: standardizing our impressions data foundation, validating our performance through third-party benchmarking and shadow studies, productizing incrementality testing at scale, and delivering a self-serve merchant data hub. This is both a hands‑on and a people‑leadership role. You will be the subject matter authority on merchant measurement in every room — with engineers, data scientists, merchants, and senior leadership — while also building and developing a small team of product managers who execute against the roadmap. You will report to the SVP of Product Management and partner closely with engineering, data science, commercial, and legal.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the product strategy for Rakuten Rewards' data infrastructure — the systems that capture, validate, and route behavioral and transactional signals across member, merchant, and partner surfaces in real time.
• Own the product for standardizing Rakuten's impressions and merchant measurement products —establishing it as the single source of truth for all downstream measurement, testing, and merchant-facing reporting.
• Lead the development of unified member and merchant profiles — rich, continuously refreshed representations of behavior, preferences, intent, and performance that serve as the intelligence layer powering personalization, recommendations, and targeting across the platform.
• Lead the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of Rakuten Rewards' ML platform — the foundational infrastructure that enables data science and engineering teams to build, experiment with, deploy, and monitor machine learning models at scale.
• Enable incrementality testing at near‑scale across top merchants and Lead Rakuten's engagement with third‑party measurement platforms to benchmark performance.
• Define and deliver a self‑serve, cloud‑agnostic merchant data hub that gives merchants direct access to their performance data, with scalable data governance and permissioning developed in partnership with Commercial and Legal.
• Cross‑Functional Leadership and Team Development Serve as the internal authority on Data and AI product strategy — across executive reviews, merchant conversations, cross‑functional planning, and external evaluations.
• Drive alignment across engineering, data science, commercial, legal, and operations — proactively surfacing open questions and unblocking teams before issues compound.

Qualifications

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Data and AI Product Depth

• Deep understanding of the modern data stack — eventing systems, data pipelines, feature engineering, and how data flows from raw capture to AI-ready form.
• Hands‑on experience defining and shipping AI or ML platform capabilities: experiment management, model deployment infrastructure, feature stores, or monitoring frameworks.
• Experience with graph databases or graph‑based data models, and an understanding of how relationship‑based data structures power recommendation and AI systems.
• Track record of developing data products — pipelines, measurement platforms, reporting tools, or data sharing products — in close partnership with data engineering and data science.
• Experience in performance marketing measurement, affiliate analytics, or digital advertising attribution is a strong plus.

Leadership and Communication

• Proven ability to lead a broad, complex portfolio — setting priorities clearly, managing dependencies across teams, and keeping cross‑functional stakeholders aligned without requiring authority.
• You distill technical complexity into clear narratives, and can calibrate your message for a CTO, a data scientist, and a merchant CMO in the same week.
• You surface open questions early, move fast on follow‑ups, and prefer to unblock rather than.

Minimum Requirements

• 8+ years of product management experience, with a significant portion in data infrastructure, ML platform, or applied AI product roles.
• Bachelor's Degree Required
• Master's Degree Preferred
• Nice to Have Background in economics, statistics, computer science, or a quantitative discipline
• Familiarity with LLM‑based productivity tooling and enterprise AI adoption patterns
• Prior work in commerce, affiliate, or partner marketing environments

Why Rakuten Rewards

Rakuten Rewards connects over 15 million members in the US with thousands of brand and retail partners. We are at a genuine inflection point — the data and AI infrastructure we build in the next two years will define how we personalize at scale, how merchants experience our value, and how the business operates. This role sits at the center of that investment. You will have broad ownership, strong cross‑functional support, and a mandate to build capabilities that matter. If you want to do serious Data and AI product leadership in a company where the data is rich, the problems are real, and the culture rewards directness and rigor — this is the role.

Five Principles for 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

Equal Employment Opportunity

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.

Salary and Benefits

USD $132,082.50 - $226,820.00 annually

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.

Company Overview

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. Everyday team members 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.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act’s Transparency in Coverage Rules require group health plans to disclose on a public website information regarding in‑network provider rates and historical out‑of‑network allowed amounts and billed charges for covered items and services in two separate machine‑readable files (MRFs). The MRFs for Rakuten’s Aetna benefit plan are provided in the link below. Aetna Transparency in Coverage: Machine-Readable Files | Rakuten