Forward Deployment Engineer -Cloud Enterprise US Section, Cloud Customer Success Dep (RS Cloud Div)
rakuten · Tokyo, Japan ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Employment
- Full time
- Category
- Customer success
- Experience
- 5+ years
rakuten · Tokyo, Japan ·
Job Description:
About Organization
As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer for the ROBIN stack, you will bridge the gap between core product development, site reliability, and enterprise customer support. Unlike traditional operational roles, this is a highly technical Developer-SRE hybrid position. You will be an active member of the development cycle—writing, contributing, and shipping production code directly to our core product stack while simultaneously managing complex production escalations for global telecom partners. You will leverage your deep systems engineering expertise to design carrier-grade cloud-native orchestration tools.
Job Duties
Production Development: Write and ship production code in Go, Python, and C to develop new features, licensing tools, and automation frameworks for the core platform.
Core Orchestration & Storage: Design and develop core components of the orchestration and storage stack, with deep analysis within Kubernetes CSI, CRI, and CNI layers.
Escalation Management: Rapidly resolve critical customer escalations by providing low-level workarounds, code modifications, and thorough Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
Software-Defined Storage (SDS): Architect and manage SDS frameworks, optimizing block, file, and object storage infrastructures for production-grade telco applications.
Lifecycle Management: Deploy new customer environments, manage upgrades, and actively develop/test robust upgrade procedures.
Workflow Automation: Create application workflows (deployment, upgrades, backups) using Helm charts and Kubernetes operators.
Distributed Systems: Ensure high availability, split-brain mitigation, consensus synchronization, and state management for large-scale distributed setups.
Workload Orchestration: Manage workloads across virtualization tiers, optimizing resource isolation and performance between containerized and virtualized environments.
Capacity Planning: Design and execute data-driven cluster capacity planning strategies to maximize hardware utilization while meeting strict telco SLA/performance constraints.
Patching & Debugging: Reproduce complex customer issues in a dedicated test lab, identify bugs, and develop code patches to resolve them.
Engineering Collaboration: Work directly with the core engineering team to root-cause deep-system product defects and contribute permanent fixes back to the main repository.
Minimum Qualifications
Experience: 5–10 years of professional experience with a strong background in software engineering, system design, and handling complex customer escalations.
Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an equivalent field.
Programming Skills: Advanced proficiency in C (or C++), Go, and Python for low-level systems automation and feature development.
Linux & Kernel: Expert Linux system administration background with hands-on experience in kernel-level troubleshooting, tracing, and performance tuning.
Storage Expertise: Deep, practical understanding of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) across block, file, and object storage. Robust knowledge of low-level data paths (DAS, Linux SCSI subsystem) and network storage fabrics (NFS, etc.).
Kubernetes Mastery: In-depth knowledge of the Kubernetes stack, distributed system paradigms, containerization, and public cloud architectures (specifically CSI, CRI, and CNI layers).
Databases: Familiarity with relational, distributed, and NoSQL databases.
Languages:
English (Overall - 3 - Advanced)