Technical Lead, Gen Ai

Job Description:
Situated in the heart of Singapore's Central Business District, Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd. is Rakuten's Asia Regional headquarters. Established in August 2012 as part of Rakuten's global expansion strategy, Rakuten Asia comprises various businesses that provide essential value-added services to Rakuten's global ecosystem. Through advertisement product development, product strategy, and data management, among others, Rakuten Asia is strengthening Rakuten Group's core competencies to take the lead in an increasingly digitalized world.

As a Technical Lead with the AI & Data Strategy Product Department, you will take a hands-on role in designing, coding, reviewing, and delivering solutions, while guiding the team with technical leadership. In this role, you will combine deep technical expertise with product-oriented thinking to ensure our AI solutions are robust, innovative, and aligned with business needs. You will lead engineering efforts end-to-end from architecture and implementation to deployment, while collaborating with product managers and stakeholders to drive success. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a hands-on technical environment and wants to lead by doing, by managing.

Responsibilities:

- Define the technical strategy and system architecture for AI chatbot and agent-based products, ensuring designs are scalable, secure, and maintainable in line with product requirements
- Lead the development of GenAI-driven chatbot systems, guiding the engineering team in implementing features that utilize machine learning, natural language processing, and knowledge-based integration
- Work closely with product management to align technical implementation with the product vision and roadmap, providing insights into technical feasibility, effort estimation, and innovative solutions to meet business goals
- Oversee the end-to-end software development lifecycle for AI projects, including coding standards, code reviews, testing, and deployment, to ensure high-quality releases
- Serve as the technical point of contact for stakeholders and clients, explaining complex technical concepts in clear terms, incorporating stakeholder feedback into technical decisions and product improvements and personally drive key implementation tasks.
- Stay informed about the latest advancements in AI/ML and evaluate how the team can leverage these innovations to enhance our product offerings
- Identify potential risks, bottlenecks, or technical debt in projects early on and implement strategies to mitigate them, ensuring on-time delivery of solutions without compromising quality
- Contribute to product strategy from a technical perspective, suggesting new features or improvements that could be enabled by emerging technologies or better use of existing data and systems
- Programming languages: Java, TypeScript, Python, Shell Script
- Platform: Hadoop, Azure, Google Cloud and internal private cloud in some cases
- Databases: BigQuery, BigTable,HBase,MySQL, Hive
- Web Applications: Node.js, Spring Boot
- Monitoring: Cloud Monitoring
- Others: Cloud Dataflow (ETL), Docker (Container Technology), Github ations(CI/CD), Kubernetes & Cloud Run (Deployment Environment)

Skills and Experiences:

- Minimum of 7 years in software development, including at least a couple of years in technical leadership role (Tech Lead, Team Lead, or similar). Proven track record of leading teams to deliver complex software projects, ideally AI or data-driven products
- Expertise in cloud platforms such as *Google Cloud Platform (GCP)*, AWS, or Azure, and hands-on experience with multi-cloud environments.
- Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and a commitment to maintaining high software quality standards.
- Ability to support production systems, including incident management and root cause analysis for issue resolution.
- Experience working closely with product management or having direct product management responsibilities. Ability to balance technical excellence with user/business needs, shaping solutions that deliver value and great user experience
- Deep understanding of AI/ML technologies (e.g. machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, large language models) and hands-on experience with related tools and frameworks. Proficiency with languages and frameworks commonly used in AI (for example, Python with TensorFlow/PyTorch) and knowledge of building and deploying AI models in production
- Strong skills in software architecture and system design. Excellent problem-solving abilities, especially in diagnosing technical issues in AI systems and optimizing performance
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts and AI model behaviors to non-technical stakeholders in a clear manner. Capable of writing and reviewing technical design documents and proposals
- Demonstrated ability to guide, mentor, and motivate an engineering team. Experience in c