RTX - API Connectivity Engineer (uConnect / Node.JS)

Rakuten Travel Xchange is a hotel distribution service providing travel retailers around the world with easy access to hotel rates and inventories through a single source. Travel businesses will be able to manage their entire hotel inventory needs from a single API connection, via a tailored web portal or template solutions, or its Travel Agent Portal, without spending valuable resources on integrating multiple supply partners.

We’re looking for an API Connectivity Engineer to join our hotel connectivity and direct contracting team.

Your mission is to support our connections to hotel suppliers, CRS, PMS and Channel Mangers during the integration and support phases of their API implementation to our platform. You’ll work closely with our external partners while continuously analyzing and improving both our processes and tooling to enable integrations to be completed faster while facilitating flawless connectivity.

Location:

Remote. Compensation in line with local market rates.

Duties:

Responsible for our connectivity with hotel suppliers.
Understand the Rakuten Travel Xchange API ( ---------- ) capabilities to the finest details
Merge knowledge of our distribution via the Rakuten Travel Xchange API to the requirements of our uConnect API, which allows external partners to connect to our platform for distribution of hotel rates and inventory
Provide technical support to engineers from companies and partners who are integrating into our uConnect API
Ensure that our technical support is friendly and empathetic, while providing solutions to problems accurately, timely and consistently
Maintain API documentation, examples, and FAQs to minimize contact rates
Make suggestions on how to improve the API based on customer feedback
Participate in the design and implementation of a scalable onboarding and proactive support frameworks for partners
Facilitate the Channel Manager mapping for hotels, ensuring rates and inventory are feeding into our system.
To work closely with our contracting and commercial teams on connectivity issues to provide holistic support both internally and externally.

Attributes:

Good understanding of JavaScript programming language, in particular Node.js
Good understanding of database management and Postgres
4+ years of relevant engineering work experience on large scale software projects, ideally with at least 3 years of experience in the connectivity with channel managers (i.e. Siteminder, Dingus, Rate Tiger, etc.) and switches (i.e. Derbysoft, DHISCO, Shiji)
Experience developing web services or Software as a Service products with stateless horizontal scaling and event-driven architecture.
Knowledge of CI/CD such as Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI, etc.
Experience using various technologies like APIs, Microservices, Kubernetes, SQL, gRPC, MessagePack, Streaming.
You’ve got excellent written and verbal English skills and you’re a clear communicator of both technical and business requirements.
You’re excited to work with a global team and partner base – this means that your onboarding and team communication would be entirely remote, so you’re also self-motivated, reliable when working independently
You have empathy for users and enjoy working with people, enabling you to provide an exceptional level of support and a seamless onboarding experience – this is a support role, so you’ll be working very closely with and supporting both internal and external customers and partners
Must also be independent and mature, have a positive working attitude with a strong sense of responsibility.

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