Technical Lead - Frontend

🏢 About Rakuten

Rakuten is one of the world's leading internet services conglomerates and Japan's largest e-commerce group. Operating across digital marketplace platforms, fintech, communications, travel, and digital media, Rakuten connects hundreds of millions of consumers globally through an integrated membership ecosystem.

The Rakuten India Development Centre in Bengaluru serves as a premier research and technology engineering hub, designing and scaling core infrastructure and customer-facing products across international markets.

🎯 The Role

Rakuten Travel is Japan's flagship travel portal, handling millions of bookings for flights, hotels, car rentals, and intercity transportation. The frontend engineering group operates a large-scale micro-frontend monorepo delivering unified experiences across consumer-facing and partner platforms.

As a Frontend Technical Lead, you will take ownership of technical direction, system architecture, and engineering execution for web applications in this monorepo. You will balance hands-on development with technical leadership: setting coding standards, unblocking engineers, driving shared design systems, and mentoring team members.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• React, TypeScript, JavaScript (ES6+), HTML5, CSS3/SASS
• State Management: Redux, Context API
• Testing: Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, CucumberJS (BDD)
• Tooling & Build: Webpack, Babel, Yarn monorepo workspaces
• Telemetry & Monitoring: New Relic, Prometheus, GCP Cloud Logging

💼 What You'll Do

• Architect and maintain enterprise-grade web applications within a multi-application micro-frontend monorepo.
• Drive the creation of reusable UI components and shared design libraries rather than one-off implementations.
• Collaborate closely with backend engineers and product teams to establish clean, type-safe API contracts.
• Enforce testing rigor and code quality gates across unit, integration, BDD, and end-to-end automated test suites.
• Monitor and optimize runtime web performance, Core Web Vitals, SSR hydration, and bundle sizes.
• Manage application health with monitoring tools (New Relic, Prometheus), investigating regressions and conducting root-cause incident reviews.
• Mentor teammates, lead technical onboarding, and enhance the wider frontend organization's developer tooling and build times.

✅ What You'll Need

• 8+ years of hands-on frontend web application engineering, including demonstrable experience leading frontend architecture.
• Extensive experience architecting and shipping complex production applications with React and TypeScript.
• Deep understanding of browser rendering pipelines, Core Web Vitals, critical rendering paths, and asset optimization.
• Strong expertise with automated testing frameworks (Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress) with a test-first engineering mindset.
• Proven track record implementing observability and diagnosing production client-side or SSR issues.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to represent technical trade-offs to product and design partners.

🌟 Nice to Have

• Experience with Next.js, Remix, or modern SSR frameworks.
• Experience establishing or contributing to Storybook-driven design systems across multiple teams.
• Hands-on background with monorepo tooling (Yarn workspaces, Turborepo) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with internationalization (i18n), localization (l10n), or large-scale e-commerce / travel platforms.