Senior Architect

Designation: Senior Architect, Demo Engineering

Why should you choose us

Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry's pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security. Rakuten Symphony has operations in Japan, the United States, Singapore, India, South Korea, Europe, and the Middle East Africa region. For more information, visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com.

Building on the technology Rakuten used to launch Japan's newest mobile network, we are taking our mobile offering global.

To support our ambitions to provide an innovative cloud-native telco platform for our customers, Rakuten Symphony is looking to recruit and develop top talent from around the globe. We are looking for individuals to join our team across all functional areas of our business – from sales to engineering, support functions to product development.

Let's build the future of mobile telecommunications together!

About Rakuten Group, Inc. (TSE: 4755) is a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Founded in Tokyo in 1997 as an online marketplace, Rakuten has expanded to offer services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications to 2 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has over 30,000 employees, and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Demo Architect to help turn complex telecom transformation ideas into working demonstrations, proof-of-value scenarios and customer-ready solution stories. This role sits at the intersection of Telco OSS, RAN operations, RIC/SMO concepts, cloud-native platforms, automation and AI-enabled operations.

The ideal candidate is hands-on enough to build credible demo flows, analytical enough to work with real or synthetic operator data, and customer-facing enough to support strategic presales conversations. This is not a presentation-only role. It requires someone who can understand an operator pain point, shape a relevant use case, build or adapt the demo environment, and explain the value clearly to both technical and executive stakeholders.

The person in this role will work closely with sales, solution architecture, product, engineering and customer-facing teams to support strategic accounts, executive briefings, technical workshops, proof-of-concept activities and major customer demonstrations.

Role Mission

The mission of this role is to make advanced telecom automation and intelligent operations feel real, practical and achievable for customers. The role should help customers move from general interest in AI, automation and cloud-native OSS toward concrete understanding of how these capabilities can reduce operational friction, improve network performance, accelerate troubleshooting and support the journey toward more autonomous operations.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design and maintain high-quality demo environments for OSS automation, assurance, observability, RAN intelligence, RIC/SMO-related scenarios and AI-assisted operations.
• Build realistic use cases using product capabilities, APIs, dashboards, workflows, network data, synthetic data and customer-provided inputs where available.
• Support strategic presales engagements by translating customer challenges into credible demo stories and proof-of-value flows.
• Work with operators to understand gaps in their current operational model, data landscape, OSS tooling and automation maturity.
• Create reusable demo assets, data sets, scripts, dashboards, architecture diagrams, solution narratives and customer-specific demo journeys.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to turn market feedback into stronger use cases, clearer demos and sharper roadmap input.

Key Responsibilities

1. Demo engineering and environment ownership

• Own the day-to-day quality, readiness and continuous improvement of demo environments used for customer meetings, executive briefings, events and internal enablement.
• Build end-to-end demo flows that connect OSS, RAN, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, automation workflows and AI-driven insights into one coherent operational story.
• Create demo scenarios that show the operational journey before and after automation, including faster detection, better triage, improved visibility, safer change execution and more consistent actioning.
• Maintain demo scripts, setup guides, dependencies, data assumptions and reset procedures so demonstrations are repeatable and reliable.
• Make demos visually clear, technically credible and grounded in real operator operating models rather than generic feature walkthroughs.

2. State-of-the-art telecom use-case development

• Prototype differentiated use cases in areas such as intelligent assurance, anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, predictive maintenance, closed-loop automation, RAN optimization and energy efficiency.
• Build practical RIC/SMO-aligned scenarios involving rApps, xApps, policies, KPIs, events, topology data, performance counters and automation workflows.
• Explore AI-enabled operations use cases, including AI-assisted incident triage, recommendation engines, natural-language operational assistants and policy-aware automation support.
• Connect technical capabilities to measurable operator value, such as MTTR reduction, lower manual effort, fewer avoidable escalations, reduced truck rolls, better SLA performance and OPEX efficiency.
• Balance innovation with credibility by avoiding science-project demos that are impressive but unrealistic for operator environments.

3. Strategic presales and customer engagement

• Support customer discovery sessions, technical workshops, innovation discussions, executive briefings and proof-of-value planning for strategic accounts.
• Help account teams understand customer pain points across network operations, service assurance, RAN performance, cloud operations, change management, data fragmentation and automation maturity.
• Translate customer requirements into demo scope, use-case flows, technical architecture, success criteria and proof-of-value plans.
• Demonstrate solutions using customer context, including sanitized data, dummy data, simulated network events, representative KPIs or customer-provided data when approved.
• Contribute to RFI/RFP responses, technical proposals and customer presentations where deeper solution credibility is needed.

4. Data-driven demonstrations and proof of value

• Work with alarms, counters, KPIs, logs, events, traces, topology, inventory, configuration data, tickets and historical incident data.
• Create realistic synthetic data sets when customer data is not available, with enough fidelity to support meaningful telecom operational scenarios.
• Build dashboards, visualizations and workflow views that make the problem, insight, action and business value easy to understand.
• Help define proof-of-value success metrics and validation steps for customer engagements.
• Partner with customer teams and internal stakeholders to show how the solution could fit into the customer environment, not just a lab environment.

5. Cross-functional enablement

• Create reusable demo packs, talk tracks, demo guides, customer journey maps, architecture diagrams and use-case documentation.
• Train sales, presales and solution teams on how to position and demonstrate key capabilities.
• Provide structured feedback to product management and engineering based on customer reactions, competitive gaps and demo limitations.
• Support marketing, analyst briefings and industry showcases with strong demonstration narratives and credible technical examples.
• Act as a bridge between customer needs, product capabilities and commercial priorities.

Required Experience

• 8-15 years of experience in telecom solution engineering, demo engineering, presales, solution architecture, OSS/RAN engineering, cloud platforms, automation or network operations.
• Technically deep enough to earn credibility with OSS, RAN, cloud and data teams.
• Strong understanding of telecom operator environments, especially network operations, service assurance, observability, incident management, change management, RAN operations and automation workflows.
• Hands-on experience building or configuring technical demos, proof-of-concepts, lab environments, customer workshops or solution prototypes.
• Ability to work across technical and business audiences, from network engineers and cloud architects to operations leaders and executive stakeholders.

RAKUTEN SHUGI PRINCIPLES:

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviours that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

• Always improve, always advance. Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen.
• Be passionately professional. Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best.
• Hypothesize - Practice - Validate - Shikumika. Use the Rakuten Cycle to success in unknown territory.
• Maximize Customer Satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction for workers in a service industry is to see their customers smile.
• Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! Always be conscious of time. Take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team.