Applied Research Data Scientist

Rakuten was established in 1997 in Japan and is at the origin of the marketplace concept.
Today, as an international Tech group, Rakuten is an ecosystem composed of 80 entities issued from e-commerce, content production, Fintech or communication such as Rakuten Viber, Rakuten Kobo, Rakuten TV… just to name a few.
With more than 25,000 people in more than 30 countries around the world, Rakuten is one of the top 5 global e-commerce platforms with a business volume of $172 billion and a community of more than 1.5 billion members.

The team 

Rakuten is the largest e-commerce company in Japan, and third largest e-commerce marketplace worldwide. Along with the global marketplaces, Rakuten supports an ever expanding list of acquisitions and strategic investments in disruptive industries and growing markets, such as communications, financial services, digital contents, and gathers more than one billion users in an international ecosystem.

Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) is the Research and Innovation department of Rakuten, with teams in Tokyo, Paris, Boston, Singapore, Bengaluru. RIT is a unique environment for scientific research and innovations in the domain of Human-Computer Interactions, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.

RIT Paris collaborates with Rakuten Ichiba, the Rakuten Japanese marketplace, and other group subsidiaries and partners, on several data science topics, including information extraction, behavioral analytics, and recommender systems.

Your Mission

The candidate is expected to develop prototypes which will be evaluated according to scientific and business criteria and may participate in the deployment into production.

In particular, the candidate will work on textual and visual data from e-commerce catalogs such as Rakuten Ichiba which contains millions of products coming from different merchants an used by millions of users. Related tasks include the extraction of semantics from product data and improving recommender systems.

Your specific missions will be:

• Communicate with the relevant business units (such as the e-commerce catalog teams) and other technical teams to analyze their issues
• Formalize the problems and study the state of the art
• Define a project roadmap, design solutions, develop prototypes, and participate in the production and integration phases
• Periodically communicate with other RIT teams and present your projects within and outside of Rakuten
• Publish the results of research activities and participate in scientific conferences

Profile

• PhD in machine learning or a related field
• At least 3 years of experience in AI research
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as Torch, TensorFlow, JAX
• Prior experience with modern neural networks architectures, e.g., Transformers, Graph NNs

• Strong communication and problem-solving skills

• Fluent English 

Profile++

• Experience in manipulating structured and non-structured big data, and in distributed processing (MapReduce, Apache Spark)

• A proven track record of publications at top-tier conferences