Solution Architect - Infrastructure (m/f/d)

Rakuten Symphony is a Rakuten Group company, providing global B2B services for the mobile telco industry and enabling next-generation, cloud-based, international mobile services.

Building on the technology Rakuten used to launch Japan’s newest mobile network, we are taking our mobile offering global. Let’s build the future of mobile telecommunications together!

About the role:

We are hiring a Solution Architect (Infrastructure & AI Automation) to join our E2E Architecture team. You will lead the design and implementation of a cutting-edge, bare-metal Kubernetes infrastructure pipeline tailored for web and telco applications. This role is unique: you will build an AI-driven automation factory that ingests packet core applications, reverse-engineers their deployment requirements, and automates their lifecycle from the lab to high-scale production environments.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• AI-Infused Ingestion: Build an AI-driven Ingestion Engine that utilizes LLMs and static/dynamic analysis to reverse-engineer proprietary packet core binaries/configurations into declarative Kubernetes manifests (Helm/Operators).
• AI-Disseminated Automation: Build the framework to teach the infrastructure; use AI to disseminate configuration logic, security policies, and deployment patterns across the entire stack, ensuring consistency from the dev lab to production.
• Closed-Loop Lifecycle: Create an end-to-end chain that automates the transition of applications: Ingestion -> Reverse Engineering -> Lab Deployment -> Automated Testing -> Production Promotion.

Observability & AI-Ops:

• Implement AI-Ops for proactive monitoring; utilize AIOps tools to analyze metrics, logs, and traces (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) to predict infrastructure failures before they impact service.
• Drive AI-assisted troubleshooting to automatically generate runbooks and remediation steps for complex network functions.
• Lab-as-Code & Automated Validation: Build an automated Lab Factory where applications are deployed, tested, and validated without human intervention.
• Automated Promotion: Develop the logic that triggers AI-driven validation checks-if the build passes the lab criteria, the pipeline automatically promotes it to production environments.

QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS:

• 10 years in infrastructure architecture, with a deep focus on Kubernetes, high-scale telco cloud environments and automation
• AI/Automation Expertise: Experience building automation frameworks that leverage AI/ML to solve complex engineering problems. Understanding of LLM prompting, agentic workflows, or ML-based anomaly detection is a significant advantage.
• Telco app knowledge: Knowledge of 4G/5G Core (EPC/5GC) architectures and the technical challenges of containerizing these legacy/complex network functions is a plus.
• DevOps/GitOps Proficiency: Strong background in CI/CD, IaC (Terraform, Ansible), and GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) at scale.
• Reverse Engineering: Experience in analyzing black-box applications and configuration extraction to enable automated redeployment and configuration changes
• Lab Automation & Digital Twin Orchestration : Proven track record of designing Lab-as-a-Code environments. You must have experience building automated testing harnesses that simulate real-world traffic patterns, automate the deployment of CNFs from scratch, and integrate automated Go/No-Go validation gates that programmatically promote builds from lab to production.
• Communication: Excellent stakeholder management skills; ability to articulate complex AI-driven architectural decisions to both technical and executive audiences.