Intern - Platform Engineering

Company Overview

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community.

Rakuten Advertising provides advertising technology and consumer insights to the world’s leading brands and retailers. Working with agencies and brands around the world, Rakuten Advertising unites technology, client strategy and consumer insights to deliver advertising experiences that drive increased brand awareness and marketing performance. With access to Rakuten’s diverse media properties and audiences, combined with an award‑winning performance network and proprietary consumer research, Rakuten Advertising creates the right conditions to reach new customers and sustain long‑lasting loyalty.

We are seeking a Graduate Intern to join our team and work on building an AI‑powered, agent‑based Incident & On‑Call Copilot inside Backstage. This role focuses on integrating AI agents into a real developer platform Backstage to help engineers during incidents by correlating service metadata, incident context, recent deployments, runbooks and all within Backstage.

At Rakuten, we pride ourselves on giving interns a genuine, immersive experience that has a direct impact on company objectives. You will do meaningful work, and with us, you'll be a true member of the team. We are also invested in your growth as an individual and professional. That's why you can expect curated events such as professional development workshops, interactions with Rakuten leadership, and relationship building opportunities with other interns and professionals at the company.

You can visit our company website and our Muse profile, to learn more about Rakuten's culture and values, as well as hear from previous interns.

Project:
Agent‑Based Incident Copilot for Backstage.

Engineers responding to incidents often lose valuable time manually gathering context from multiple tools such as logs, metrics, incident management systems, CI/CD and runbooks. This project addresses that challenge by embedding an interactive AI‑powered incident copilot directly inside Backstage
. The copilot acts as a context‑aware AI agent that engineers can interact with using natural language to quickly understand what is happening, what has changed recently, and how similar incidents were resolved in the past.

• Backstage plugin development (frontend & backend)
• AI agent workflows using Lang Chain, Auto Gen, or similar SDKs
• Prompt design and AI interaction patterns
• Read‑only integrations with logs, incident, CI/CD and documentation systems
• Responsible AI guardrails

• Master’s in computer science or related field
• Programming fundamentals in JavaScript or Type Script, Python
• Basic understanding of LLMs and AI agents
• Foundational knowledge of Lang Chain, Auto Gen or similar Agent SDKs
• Familiarity with Git

• React or Node.js exposure
• Cloud platform familiarity (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Interest in incident management or SRE

• Degree in progress

• Deliver an interactive AI Incident Copilot in Backstage
• Demonstrate safe and responsible AI usage
• Present MVP to engineering leadership

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the hourly rate for this role will be between $35–$50 per hour. Individual compensation will vary based on job‑related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location.

• Always improve, always advance:
  Only be satisfied with complete success – Kaizen
• Passionately professional:
  Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to…