JD – Tech Lead – Frontend

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 robust, 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 micro-

frontend 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 (shared libraries, design system, 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 (design system, icons, 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/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 (New Relic, Prometheus) and incident follow-through.
- Set and enforce engineering standards: code review practices, testing strategy

(BDD/RTL/unit/E2E), 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 — tooling, local dev setup, build speed, documentation — for

the wider frontend org.
- Act as an escalation point for the most technically challenging problems and cross-team

dependencies.Core Competencies
- Deep, hands-on expertise building production React + TypeScript applications at scale.
- Strong grasp of component architecture, state management trade-offs, and rendering

performance (CSR vs SSR, code-splitting, bundle size).
- Practical, test-first mindset across unit (Jest), BDD (jest-cucumber), RTL, and E2E (Cypress) layers.
- Deep expertise in web performance fundamentals (Core Web Vitals, critical rendering path,

JS/CSS payload optimization).
- Expertise of how SSR/hydration choices affect crawlability/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, PMs, designers.
- Comfortable making and owning architectural trade-off decisions with long-term maintainability
- Track record of coaching engineers and raising the technical bar of a team.
- Willingness to participate in on-call rotation for production issues.




- Ability to triage, mitigate, and root-cause front-end production incidents (client errors,

performance regressions, SSR failures).

Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's or Master’s degree in computer science or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of hands-on front-end development experience, ideally including a period leading a

team technically — driving architecture decisions, code reviews.
- Demonstrated experience owning architecture decisions for a large-scale, production React app.
- Extensive experience writing unit and integration tests at scale (90%+ coverage).
- Deep understanding of web performance in JavaScript and CSS, and ability to diagnose issues.
- Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., New Relic, Prometheus, GCP

Cloud Logging) —able to independently diagnose and proactively flag production issues.
- Strong communication skills, positive character, and empathy — able to influence.
- Strong motivation for building products with team spirit, and driving improvements within 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, functional components) and Redux/Flux

- JavaScript (ES6+) and TypeScript
- HTML5 & CSS3 (SASS/SCSS), responsive design
- Babel, Webpack, Yarn/npm package management

- RESTful API integration
- Jest, Cypress, React Testing Library, CucumberJSPreferred / Nice-to-Have
- Node.js, Express, custom middleware
- Next.js, Remix, or other SSR frameworks
- Design systems / component libraries (e.g., Storybook-driven)
- Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of production products
- Monorepo architecture (Yarn workspaces or similar)
- CI/CD with Jenkins, Docker, 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.

📌 Technical Lead - Frontend (Bengaluru)
🏢 Rakuten International
📍 Bengaluru