Technical Program Manager, LLM data

Rakuten Group, Inc. is a global leader in internet services and has a diverse ecosystem spanning across e-commerce, fintech, communications and more serving approximately 1.8 billion members worldwide. Founded in Tokyo in 1997, the Group operates in over 30 countries and regions with more than 30,000 employees.
 

Based in Singapore's Central Business District, Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd. serves as the regional headquarters for Asia, driving value through areas such as advertising product development, product strategy, and data management to support Rakuten Group's global ecosystem. Learn more at: 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. 

The Frontier Research Department is responsible for advancing Rakuten’s core AI capabilities, including large language models and related technologies. The team works across model development, post-training, evaluation, deployment, and data strategy to improve model quality, alignment, scalability, and practical effectiveness.  As LLM data program manager, you will partner with research and engineering to design and implement pragmatic solutions for collecting high-quality data for training and evaluation. You will be a key interface between our business team, research and engineering, and data annotation team.  

Key Responsibilities

• Data Lifecycle Management: Driving initiatives for data acquisition, cleaning, labeling, and augmentation for training LLMs and evaluating agent  

• Human Feedback Operations (RLHF/SFT): Designing and managing programs that turn human feedback into reliable signals for model evaluation and fine-tuning.  

• Technical Roadmap Collaboration: Working with engineering to improve data annotation tools, automate workflows, and enhance data platform function  

• Metric and Performance Tracking: Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) related to data quality, quantity, and model performance to optimize production 

Required qualifications 

• 5 years of experience in AI, LLM operations, or data-intensive program management. 

• Degree in engineering or science   

• Solid understanding of model training techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). 

• Strong analytical skills to analyze metric trends and data quality. 

• Ability to manage high-uncertainty projects from end-to-end, align cross-functional teams, and manage vendors. 

• Familiarity with Python or other coding language.  

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