Technical Project Manager - Conversational Experiences Department (CXD)
rakuten · Tokyo, Japan ·
- Category
- Project management
- Experience
- 7+ years
rakuten · Tokyo, Japan ·
Job Description:
Business Overview
The vision of the Conversational Experiences Department (CXD) is to change the world’s view of what is possible with AI by creating incredible experiences that ‘just work’. We propose, design, and build AI experiences that bring joy and value to Rakuten businesses, and our mission is to bring these experiences to the world. We build Conversational AI products such as chatbots, voice assistants, and semantic search. We have been employing Large Language Model (LLM) technology for several years, and are on the cutting edge of Japanese language solutions. Our mission is to actualize 'shopping is entertainment' and maximize the value of Rakuten ecosystem through the delivery of super personal assistants.
Department Overview
You’ll join a 60-person AI for Customer Service team: engineers, TPMs, data analysts, dialogue designers: responsible for modernizing legacy contact-center tooling and workloads into an agentic Generative AI stack codenamed Raptor. We already power Rakuten Mobile’s pre-sale onboarding and support (“RMAA”) and are building the pipeline for of customer service and engagement experience. Now, we’re moving from a successful V1 into the scale-up phase: expanding to all 70 BUs and leveraging AI to multiply Rakuten’s core capabilities in e-commerce, finance, logistics, digital content, and beyond.
Position:
Why We Hire
We are hiring a Technical Project Manager (More than 7 years’ experience in technical project/software delivery) to lead project delivery of AI-powered contact centre capabilities - chat, voice, and human-agent experiences - built on large language models (LLMs).
Engineering owns technical design and implementation; you own the decision process, alignment, and delivery outcomes - facilitating trade-offs, closing gaps when priorities or opinions diverge, and keeping the team from stalling without dictating the solution.
You will run integrated project plans (timeline, dependencies, resources, risks, communication), steer work through the full delivery lifecycle, and keep scope, quality, and release readiness visible - including security, compliance, and performance and support for legal/security approvals where required. Proficiency in Jira and Confluence is expected for day-to-day execution.
Position Details
Responsibilities
1) Planning, scope, and stakeholder alignment.
- Define project scope, objectives, and deliverables with business owners, product managers, and technology stakeholders.
- Build and maintain integrated plans covering timelines, milestones, dependencies, resource needs, risks, and communication cadence.
- Facilitate technical feasibility and trade-off discussions so decisions are made with the right people and information.
- Establish measurable success criteria and reporting so progress and outcomes are visible to leadership and the team.
2) Driving team alignment and decisions
- Facilitate consensus on priorities, technical approach, and trade-offs without dictating engineering solutions.
- Recognize when discussions stall or decisions are avoided; reframe options, surface trade-offs, set decision deadlines, and escalate when needed.
- Bridge business requirements and technical execution so stakeholders and engineers share clear, aligned outcomes.
- Run effective meetings focused on unblocking work, resolving disagreements, and agreeing next steps - not status-only updates.
3) Execution and delivery
- Steer work through the software development lifecycle: requirements, design, development, testing, release, and post-launch stabilization.
- Manage scope through a lightweight, disciplined change process; ensure impact and trade-offs are understood before changes are accepted.
- Identify and manage risks and issues proactively; drive resolution and escalate with clear options when the team cannot resolve alone.
- Coordinate across workstreams, teams, and vendors; ensure integration points, handoffs, and dependencies are clear and tracked.
- Ensure security, compliance, and performance are addressed through delivery; support legal and security approval processes as required.
4) Quality and testing
- Hold the team accountable for agreed quality standards, including code review practices, automated testing, and regression coverage as part of delivery.
- Ensure QA completes its work to an appropriate standard: clear expectations, acceptance criteria, visible progress, and timely closure before release.
- Work with QA leads or engineers so test planning, execution, and defect management are fit for purpose for each release; escalate when release confidence is at risk.
5) Launch, operations handover, and improvement
- Coordinate releases and rollouts, including rollback planning and stakeholder communication.
- Support post-launch stability and smooth handover to operations or BAU support.
- Facilitate retrospectives and follow-through on agreed improvements to ways of working.
Mandatory Qualifications:
- JLPT N2 Japanese (reading, writing, and speaking) for stakeholder communication, documentation, and meetings.
- Proficiency with Jira and Confluence as primary tools for planning, tracking, and collaboration.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
- More than 7 years of experience in technical project management delivering software products.
- Technical literacy sufficient to follow architectural discussions, understand trade-offs, and ask useful questions - you do not own technical design.
- Proven ability to drive consensus when direction is unclear, without overriding engineering judgement.
- Solid experience with Agile delivery (Scrum or Kanban); able to adapt to team maturity.
- Strong risk and issue management.
- Excellent communication and facilitation across executives, business stakeholders, and engineering.
- Experience helping a team or organization improve how projects are run when standards, tools, or rituals were missing or inconsistent.
- Product management sensibility - challenging requirements and scope, not only accepting them.
Desired Qualifications:
- PMP, PMI-ACP, or equivalent project management certification.
- Prior hands-on experience in software engineering or solution architecture (earlier in career is sufficient) - for credibility and context, not to override the team.
- Experience in the contact centre industry (e.g. omnichannel, routing, workforce management, telephony/CPaaS, agent tooling, quality and compliance in high-volume or regulated voice/chat environments).
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and CI/CD practices.
- Working knowledge of AI/LLM-based contact centre-relevant applications (e.g. conversational AI, latency/cost/risk trade-offs, integration complexity).
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