Website:
rakuten.co.in
Job details:
Position Summary
Rakuten Travel is the largest online travel platform in Japan, serving millions of users searching for hotels, rental cars, buses, and air tickets. Over decades, we have built a strong, unique business strategy in synergy with Rakuten's principles, aiming to maximize satisfaction for users and partners as we grow into one of the world's leading travel platforms.
We are expanding our engineering team at Rakuten India to help accomplish this mission. Our front-end platform is a large-scale microfrontend monorepo spanning multiple customer- and partner-facing applications. Team members are distributed globally and collaborate in English.
As a Tech Lead for the Frontend team, you will own the technical direction and core architecture of one or more applications within our micro-frontend monorepo, leading a team of talented engineers toward advanced, maintainable, and user-friendly web applications. You will balance hands-on engineering with technical leadership: setting standards, unblocking the team, driving cross-application consistency through shared libraries, design systems, and tooling, and coaching engineers to grow. You will partner closely with Engineering and Product Management to shape the roadmap and ensure delivery without compromising quality.
What You Will Do
- Design and evolve large-scale front-end architecture and core framework decisions.
- Lead the team in developing innovative, intuitive, and reusable UI components, favoring shared libraries such as design systems, icons, and UI components over one-off implementations.
- Drive technical planning: break down initiatives, estimate effort, sequence work, and de-risk complex changes across the monorepo.
- Collaborate with backend engineers and architects to define clean, well-typed API contracts and seamless UI/API integration.
- Research, evaluate, and introduce new web technologies and patterns to improve the platform.
- Partner with product managers and UI/UX designers to shape ground-breaking features in an Agile way, representing engineering feasibility and trade-offs.
- Own performance, reliability, maintainability, and quality of the applications, including monitoring with New Relic and Prometheus and incident follow-through.
- Set and enforce engineering standards: code review practices, testing strategy across BDD, RTL, unit, and E2E layers, linting rules, and CI/CD gates.
- Coach and mentor engineers on the team, run technical onboarding, and grow the team’s collective skill level.
- Maximize developer experience through tooling, local development setup, build speed, and documentation for the wider frontend organization.
- Act as an escalation point for the most technically challenging problems and cross-team dependencies
Core Competencies
- Deep, hands-on expertise building production React and TypeScript applications at scale.
- Strong grasp of component architecture, state management trade-offs, and rendering performance, including CSR vs. SSR, code-splitting, and bundle size.
- Practical, test-first mindset across Unit (Jest), BDD (jest-cucumber), React Testing Library, and E2E (Cypress) layers.
- Deep expertise in Web performance fundamentals, including Core Web Vitals, the critical rendering path, and JavaScript/CSS payload optimization.
- Expertise in how SSR and hydration choices affect crawlability and indexation of high-traffic pages.
- Demonstrated ability to operate across multiple projects in parallel, switching context with low overhead while still driving each initiative to completion.
- Ownership mentality: designs for maintainability, accessibility, and internationalization.
- Clear, proactive communicator who collaborates well with backend engineers, product managers, and designers.
- Comfortable making and owning architectural trade-off decisions with long-term maintainability in mind.
- Track record of coaching engineers and raising the technical bar of a team.
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation for production issues.
- Ability to triage, mitigate, and root-cause front-end production incidents, including client errors, performance regressions, and SSR failures
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- 8 to 10 years of hands-on front-end development experience, ideally including a period leading a team technically and driving architecture decisions and code reviews.
- Demonstrated experience owning architecture decisions for a large-scale, production React application.
- Extensive experience writing unit and integration tests at scale, with 90%+ coverage.
- Deep understanding of web performance in JavaScript and CSS, and the ability to diagnose issues.
- Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring stacks such as New Relic, Prometheus, and GCP Cloud Logging, with the ability to independently diagnose and proactively flag production issues.
- Strong communication skills, positive character, and empathy, with the ability to influence.
- Strong motivation for building products with team spirit and driving improvements within the team.
- Strong UX and design sensibilities, with care for the smallest details
Mandatory Technical Stack
- Single-page application architecture and universal/isomorphic JavaScript (SSR)
- React: Hooks, Context API, and functional components
- Redux / Flux
- JavaScript (ES6+) and TypeScript
- HTML5 and CSS3 (SASS/SCSS), including responsive design
- Babel, Webpack, and Yarn/npm package management
- RESTful API integration
- Jest, Cypress, React Testing Library, and CucumberJS
Preferred / Nice-to-Have
- Node.js, Express, and custom middleware
- Next.js, Remix, or other SSR frameworks
- Design systems and component libraries, for example Storybook-driven systems
- Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of production products
- Monorepo architecture using Yarn workspaces or similar
- CI/CD with Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Contribution to open source
- Knowledge of the travel or e-commerce domain
- Experience defining or evolving a design system component library used across teams
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