DevOps Engineer

Job Description:

Role Summary

We are looking for a self-motivated, highly driven DevOps Engineer who thrives on technical ownership and autonomous task execution. In this role, you will bridge day-to-day infrastructure engineering and long-term reliability by taking loosely defined requirements, breaking them down into concrete technical tasks, and driving them to completion with minimal day-to-day oversight.

You will design, automate, and maintain cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and observability frameworks while partnering closely with software development and platform teams.

🎯 Key Responsibilities

1. Individual Task Execution & Infrastructure Ownership

• Autonomous Delivery: Take ownership of infrastructure deliverables and feature sets from inception to deployment; operate independently between milestone check-ins.
• Problem Decomposition: Translate high-level architectural requirements and loosely defined tickets into well-scoped, actionable technical tasks and execution plans.
• Root-Cause Problem Solving: Investigate, diagnose, and permanently resolve complex production and CI/CD infrastructure failures rather than applying temporary patches.

2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Cloud Engineering

• Design, provision, and maintain secure, scalable cloud infrastructure using Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent IaC frameworks.
• Manage cloud networking, compute capacity, security groups, and IAM policies following least-privilege principles.

3. CI/CD & Release Automation

• Build, optimize, and troubleshoot automated CI/CD release pipelines to enable fast, safe, and repeatable application deployments.
• Debug build/release failures at both the framework and infrastructure layer (e.g., container build failures, permissions, compute bottlenecks).

4. Reliability, Observability & Operational Excellence

• Implement proactive monitoring, alerting, and log aggregation (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) to ensure system visibility.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident triage; write post-incident reviews (PIRs) and implement preventative automations.
• Champion operational excellence, system availability, and performance benchmarking.

5. Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

• Proactively communicate timelines, architectural tradeoffs, and roadblocks early to squad leads and stakeholders.
• Contribute to team design/architecture reviews, write concise technical specs, and mentor junior engineers.

🛠️ Required Qualifications & Technical Skills

• Experience: 3–5+ years of dedicated experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Cloud Infrastructure Engineering.
• Cloud Platforms: Strong hands-on proficiency in public cloud environments (AWS), including core services (VPC, EC2, EKS, S3, IAM, Route53, RDS).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Solid experience writing modular, reusable Terraform or CloudFormation scripts.
• CI/CD & Automation: Proven track record building and managing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Containers & Orchestration: Solid working knowledge of Docker and container orchestration (Kubernetes / ECS).
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in at least one scripting/programming language (Python, Bash, or Go).
• OS & Networking: Strong Linux systems administration fundamentals, networking concepts (DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP/S, load balancers), and security best practices.

💡 Key Behavioral Competencies (Self-Drive & Mindset)

• High Motivation & Ownership: Follows through on commitments end-to-end with pride of ownership; rolls up sleeves to solve blockers rather than waiting for direction.
• Clear & Proactive Communication: Consistently communicates project progress, identifies risks before starting major tasks, and flags roadblocks without disappearing into low-impact work.
• Critical Thinking & Simplicity: Looks at multiple solutions, validates trade-offs in context, and actively reduces unnecessary system complexity.
• Continuous Learning (Shugi): Eager to explore new tools and techniques, actively solicits constructive feedback, and continuously refines internal processes (Shikumika).

🌟 Preferred / Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with database migrations, replication tools (e.g., Debezium, pglogical, AWS DMS), or PostgreSQL administration.
• Experience with GitOps methodologies and deployment tools (ArgoCD).
• Relevant cloud or Kubernetes certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer, CKA).

Rakuten Shugi Principles:

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviours 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.

• Be 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 success in unknown

territory.

• Maximize Customer Satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction for workers in a service industry is to

see their customers smile.

• Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! Always be conscious of time. Take charge, set clear goals, and engage

your team