Engineer, SRE

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 Viki is a global entertainment streaming platform that specializes in Asian content. Our platform enables millions of viewers to discover and enjoy primetime shows and movies, subtitled in over 150 languages. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, we also have offices in Singapore, Seoul, and Shanghai, ensuring a strong global presence and a deep connection to the heart of Asian entertainment. Our platform is home to a large and loyal community of fans who share a passion for Asian culture and entertainment. Join us in our mission to bridge cultures and connect the world to Asian entertainment. At Rakuten Viki, we offer a chance to be part of a global community that celebrates culture, creativity, and connection.

We are in search of a Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and support our business growth. This role will be based in Singapore and reporting to SRE Manager.

About the SRE Team:

The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Viki builds and operates the platform that powers Viki's large-scale, distributed systems. We develop and maintain services that power Viki's API and business intelligence, as well as make architecture changes to keep them scalable, reliable, secure, and cost‑efficient. Our scope spans Performance engineering, FinOps, Security, Reliability Engineering to CI/CD. We run our systems on GCP with GKE and our media pipeline on AWS. We also use Spinnaker, Cloudbuild, Datadog, PostgreSQL, Redis to name a few tools.

Our team has recently delivered significant cost savings by optimizing GCP infrastructure and routing traffic efficiently across multiple geographical regions. We've led deep-dive network security reviews, including traffic analysis and evaluating modern WAF solutions to strengthen our defences. Looking ahead, we're also actively exploring how AI can boost developer productivity across Engineering.

Key Responsibilities:

• Proactively seek out and implement opportunities to automate infrastructure management through Infrastructure as Code and an Agentic AI mindset.

• Work closely with developers to help build systems that abstract out infrastructure for the organization

• Be part of the architectural discussions and instill current SRE principles across development teams.

• Focus on non-functional aspects such as security, performance and reliability.

• Ensure we are instilling security and budget management processes into the development cycle.

• Continuously improve our systems, scale them to the next level, and create guidelines for developers to follow.

• Be a part of the on call roster to ensure reliability and availability of the platform.

• Handle developer requests such as system access, infrastructure provisioning, configuration changes and middleware upgrades.

• Develop software/tools that  boost developer productivity and reduce toil in SRE tasks.

• Creating reports and regular tracking of costs, reliability, performance and other aspects around running software 24x7, monitoring key systems, evaluating tools processes and vendors.

• Regularly assess security alerts, perform vulnerability assessments, assist in carrying out security audits, and implement fixes to reduce security flaws.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent

• Minimum 2 years' experience in SRE or in roles practicing DevOps principles.

• Experience in software development would be an advantage.

• Experience in building scalable & robust systems and delivering top tier services with impact worldwide.

• Possesses a strong aptitude for recognizing problems, taking ownership of the resolution, and ability to collaborate with cross functions to find effective solutions.

• A solid foundation in understanding of practical operating system concepts around Linux/ Unix and grasp of basic networking are essential.

• Familiarity with Docker / Kubernetes or any equivalent systems is required.

• Familiarity with IaC, CI/CD and Observability concepts & tools is required. 

• Familiarity with either AWS or GCP would be an advantage.

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.

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