Senior Technical Project Manager, Agent Development

Situated in the heart of Singapore's Central Business District, Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd. is Rakuten's Asia Regional headquarters. Established in August 2012 as part of Rakuten's global expansion strategy, Rakuten Asia comprises various businesses that provide essential value-added services to Rakuten's global ecosystem. Through advertisement product development, product strategy, and data management, among others, Rakuten Asia is strengthening Rakuten Group's core competencies to take the lead in an increasingly digitalized world.

Rakuten Group, Inc. 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 approximately 1.7 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has nearly 32,000 employees and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/.

The AI & Data Division (AIDD), creates powerful, customer-focused search, recommendation, data science, advertising, marketing price, and inventory optimization solutions to a variety of businesses in Rakuten group. As part of AIDD, AILab builds new solutions that have the potential to transform how users interact with Rakuten service. Our goal is to drive innovation by developing new products and capabilities that deliver significant impact over longer timeframes using AI.

We are building the next generation of AI-powered shopping experiences - autonomous agents that search, compare, reason, and transact on behalf of users. As Technical project manager for Agent Development, you will ensure that cross-functional teams deliver on time, within scope, and at quality.

Core responsibilities

Program planning & execution

• Build and maintain master program plans covering all workstreams: model development, API integrations, front-end, QA, and data pipelines

• Define milestones, dependencies, and critical path across multiple concurrent agent projects

• Run sprint planning, backlog grooming, and quarterly planning ceremonies across engineering and ML teams

• Track and report program status, risks, and blockers to leadership on a weekly cadence

Delivery management

• Budget management

• Drive on-time delivery of agent features

• Identify scope creep early and facilitate trade-off decisions with product and engineering leads

• Manage release schedules, coordinate UAT, and own go-live checklists for each agent launch

• Maintain a risk register and ensure mitigation plans are in place and actioned

Process & tooling

• Prepare and present program dashboards, steering committee updates, and executive briefings

• Facilitate alignment meetings, decision logs, and RACI documentation to keep accountability clear

• Define and continuously improve PM processes, templates, and ways of working for the agent development team

• Own the team's project management tooling (Jira, Confluence, or equivalent) - structure boards, set up workflows, and ensure hygiene

• Conduct retrospectives and translate learnings into process improvements

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of technical program or project management experience, delivering large-scale software products

• Strong command of project management fundamentals: work breakdown structures, dependency mapping, critical path analysis, risk management, and stakeholder reporting

• Experience managing programs or projects that involve API integrations, data pipelines, or ML model deployments

• Excellent written and verbal communication skilled at producing clear status reports and exec summaries

• Proficiency with project management tools (Jira, Asana, Linear, Confluence, or similar)

Nice to have

• Familiarity with LLM or AI agent development cycles - enough to ask the right questions and spot risks

• Experience running programs across both agile and waterfall workstreams simultaneously