Technical Product Manager (RTX)

Job Description:

Rakuten Travel Xchange (https://solutions.travel.rakuten.com/about-us) is the accommodation wholesale and travel technology division within the Rakuten group. We distribute our global inventory and the directly negotiated rates of Rakuten Travel and Rakuten STAY. We enable our clients globally to send their guests anywhere in the world – all delivered through the latest scalable cutting-edge technology. This innovative platform serves as a pivotal bridge between travel suppliers and sellers, providing an extensive inventory of travel products such as flights and hotels. Rakuten Travel Xchange empowers both suppliers and sellers by offering an expansive global reach and enhancing revenue potential. It simplifies transactions, making it an efficient tool for businesses seeking to excel in the dynamic travel market.

We are seeking an experienced Technical Product Manager (TPM) to serve as the strategic architect between our business stakeholders and backend engineering teams. In this role, you will maintain a bird's-eye view of our entire business operation flow, ensuring that every piece of our system architecture and integration workflow seamlessly supports the big picture.

You will not just be managing technical outputs; you will be acting as a vital translator who understands complex business operations and bridges those overarching business goals into precise, actionable technical terms.

Responsibilities:

• Strategic Translation & Alignment: Maintain a holistic, big-picture understanding of the B2B travel distribution ecosystem. Act as the primary conduit to bridge abstract business goals (e.g., revenue targets, operational efficiency) into precise technical specifications, actionable user stories, and system architecture designs.

• Critical Evaluation & Skeptical Thinking: Apply rigorous critical and skeptical thinking to all product initiatives and stakeholder requests. Instead of simply asking, “Can we build this?”, you will constantly ask, “Should we build this, and what are the long-term risks?” to protect the platform from unnecessary technical debt.

• Analytical Experimentation & Data Validation: Design and lead data-informed experiments to validate product hypotheses. Utilize tools like BigQuery and other analytical platforms to analyze system performance, monitor API adoption, and translate technical latency or uptime metrics into tangible business impacts.

• Complex System Integration: Navigate and manage integrations across specialized travel industry workflows, handling complex data mapping between legacy systems (e.g., GDS XML/SOAP feeds) and modern architectures.

• Cross-Functional Leadership: Lead cross-functional planning and backlog grooming, conducting upfront research to identify potential technical blockers before they reach the engineering sprint cycle.

Requirements:

• Experience: 3 to 5 years of product management experience, with a proven track record of delivering complex technical products and thinking in systems rather than just isolated features.

• Travel Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of the B2B travel technology landscape, including OTA standards, New Distribution Capability (NDC), and GDS web services.

• Technical Fluency: Strong proficiency in evaluating backend architecture (Microservices, SQL/NoSQL, AWS/Azure Cloud), advanced web protocols (HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC), and modern API specifications (GraphQL, statelessness, cacheability).

• Data & Analytics: Hands-on experience with analytical data warehouses like BigQuery, capable of setting up tracking, querying data, and designing A/B tests or analytical experiments to measure product success.

• Communication & Skepticism: Exceptional ability to communicate with both non-technical executives and highly technical engineering teams. You must possess a healthy dose of skepticism to challenge assumptions, facilitate tradeoff discussions, and ensure that engineering efforts are always aligned with the highest-value business outcomes.

Rakuten is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications regardless of sex, marital status, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious belief or age.