Intern – AI Engineer

Location Type: Remote: open to residents of any country

 

Job Description:

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.

Job Summary:

Rakuten Advertising is seeking a highly skilled AI Engineer Intern to join our AI Center of Excellence. This role is designed for an advanced builder with significant practical experience in developing and deploying multi-agent systems.

As an intern, you will not simply be observing; you will be an active contributor to our engineering teams, assisting in the design and implementation of production-grade AI solutions. You will focus on orchestrating complex agentic workflows that drive intelligent automation across our global advertising platform. This is a unique opportunity to apply your expertise in Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent frameworks to solve enterprise-scale challenges.

The Intern Experience: 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.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop Multi-Agent Architectures: Collaborate with senior engineers to design and implement systems where multiple AI agents coordinate to execute complex workflows.
• Engineer Robust Frameworks: Build and refine agent communication patterns, memory management systems, and tool-usage protocols to ensure reliability and scalability.
• System Integration: Integrate LLMs with external APIs, databases, and existing enterprise infrastructure to create seamless automation loops.
• Reliability & Scaling: Assist in creating orchestration layers that manage failure modes gracefully and ensure consistent performance in a production environment.
• Innovation & Best Practices: Contribute to internal codebases and help establish engineering standards for agentic development within the organization.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Proven Experience: Demonstrated history of building multi-agent systems (via internships, research, or significant personal projects).
• Technical Proficiency: Strong programming skills in Python with an emphasis on writing clean, maintainable, production-quality code.
• Framework Knowledge: Hands-on experience with agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, or custom-built solutions).
• LLM Expertise: Deep understanding of Large Language Model capabilities, context management, and advanced prompting strategies.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Active contributions to open-source AI or agent-based repositories.
• Familiarity with asynchronous programming, message queues, and distributed systems concepts.
• Experience implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and utilizing vector databases.
• Knowledge of evaluation metrics and observability tools for monitoring agent performance.

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.

Five Principles for Success
Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors 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
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 succeed in unknown territory
Maximize Customer Satisfaction – The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile
Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! – Always be conscious of time – take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.