QA Automation Engineer

Job Description:

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for visa sponsorship nor transfer of a visa by the start date of employment.

Rakuten believes that in-person collaboration is important to our success: this role is onsite 4 days per week in our San Mateo, CA office, and 1 day per week onsite or offsite at the choice of the employee.

We are seeking a hands-on QA Automation Engineer to join the Productivity Engineering organization at Rakuten Rewards. You will help ensure the quality of backend services, APIs, event-driven systems, and data pipelines while building automation and AI-powered tools that improve testing efficiency and release confidence. In this individual contributor role, you will combine software development skills with quality engineering expertise to create reusable validation capabilities, develop AI-assisted testing workflows, and help engineering teams identify defects earlier. You will work closely with developers, QA, product, and DevOps teams throughout the development lifecycle.
Key Responsibilities:

• Quality Ownership: Own end-to-end quality for assigned backend features — define the test strategy, expand coverage with AI tooling, and keep validation continuous through the development lifecycle. Partner with engineering and product on requirements and release readiness.
• Risk Detection: Analyze requirements, service behavior, and production signals to surface edge cases, coverage gaps, missing telemetry, flaky tests, and configuration drift early.
• Backend Test Automation: Build and maintain API, integration, and end-to-end tests in Java or a comparable language. Use AI coding assistants and test agents to accelerate development, widen coverage, and reduce maintenance.
• Infrastructure and CI/CD: Deploy and validate backend services in Docker and Kubernetes. Integrate automated tests and AI-assisted checks into GitHub release workflows so every change returns actionable quality feedback.
• Agent-Based Testing: Develop AI agents that exercise API workflows, generate test data, run exploratory backend testing, and validate interactions across services and databases. Verify business rules, API contracts, and data consistency across environments.
• Distributed Systems and Performance: Validate microservices, event-driven workflows, message queues, and asynchronous pipelines, including retries, duplicate events, and failure recovery. Use SQL and AI-assisted analysis to detect data anomalies, and run load tests to assess latency, throughput, and scalability.
• Production Troubleshooting: Independently investigate production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and tools such as Bits AI. Group related failures, support defect triage, and drive root cause analysis. Validate findings, communicate release risk clearly, and promote effective AI-assisted quality practices across engineering teams.

Qualifications:

• 3 to 5 years of experience in Quality Assurance or Quality Engineering, including at least 2 years of hands-on backend or API test automation
• Java or a similar programming language, with hands-on software development experience building test frameworks, automation services, AI tooling, or developer productivity solutions.
• Experience applying LLMs or AI coding tools to testing and development workflows: generating tests, analyzing failures, or supporting defect triage. Experience reviewing and validating test outputs.
• Experience with REST APIs and backend services, writing complex SQL queries and validating data integrity and business rules in PostgreSQL.
• Understanding of event-driven systems and experience testing message queues or streaming workflows (like Kafka) including asynchronous behavior and error handling.
• Experience with test frameworks (pytest, JUnit, TestNG, or Spock) and GitHub workflows including pull requests, code reviews, branching, release management, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of DevOps practices, AWS services, Docker, and Kubernetes, including deployment validation and troubleshooting test environ issues.
• Analytical and communication skills, with the ability to own testing activities independently and collaborate across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to investigate production issues independently, using AI-assisted troubleshooting tools such as Bits AI or similar solutions to support evidence-based root cause analysis.
• Bachelor's or Masters's Degree
• Preferred: ISTQB Foundation Level Certification or equivalent

About Rakuten

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 a leading shopping platform that offers Cash Back on purchases from your favorite brands. By partnering with thousands of brands in apparel, beauty and wellness, dining, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscription boxes, and more, Rakuten helps members save and get more on everyday purchases. Since its founding in 1999, Rakuten has become the largest and most rewarding shopping program, and its members have earned $4.6 billion in Cash Back just for shopping through Rakuten. For more information, visit Rakuten.com.

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

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.

As part of our Rakuten interview process, we encourage applicants to use their own words, rather than AI-generated content. Tell us your story in a way that's personal and authentic.

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. 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.

USD $96,442.50 - $163,680.00 annually