Lead Product Designer, Ad Platforms

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 is the most rewarding way to shop, giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform, Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty and wellness, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscriptions, and dining, helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999, Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind. Learn more at Rakuten.com.

Job Summary:

Rakuten Rewards is seeking a Lead Product Designer for our Ad Platform team – a B2B product that empowers merchants to create, manage, and optimize advertising campaigns on Rakuten. This is a senior, highly hands-on individual contributor role reporting directly to the VP of Product Design. You will be a foundational designer for this platform, helping define its UX from the ground up, as there is no established design system or mature UX framework yet.

This role is best suited for a designer who thrives on ownership, ambiguity, and creating structure where none exists – independently driving design decisions while contributing to product strategy and conducting competitive research in a fast-paced environment. We embrace AI-assisted design workflows, and you'll be expected to leverage tools like Claude Code to rapidly prototype and validate ideas.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end design for the Ad Platform, from concept and user flows through wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs.

• Define foundational UX patterns and interaction standards that will scale as the product matures.

• Design intuitive merchant experiences that help users configure campaigns, manage budgets, adjust commission strategies, and interpret reporting data.

• Drive research and competitive analysis - meeting directly with merchants and internal stakeholders to uncover pain points and validate solutions.

• Leverage AI tools and Claude Code to rapidly build interactive prototypes that validate UX concepts early, reducing reliance on engineering cycles for exploratory work.

• Embrace AI-assisted workflows across research synthesis, ideation, and iteration - bringing a modern, tool-forward approach to the design process.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, engineers, and UX writers; communicate design rationale clearly and make pragmatic tradeoffs with engineering.

• Contribute informally to design culture through critiques, knowledge sharing, and helping raise the bar across the broader design org.

Qualifications:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Communication Excellence: Excellent communication skills, an engaging presentation style, and strong visual storytelling.

• Technical Proficiency: Deep Figma proficiency, including auto layout, components, and variants.

• AI Proficiency: Familiarity with AI tools and their application in design workflows, including rapid prototyping.

• Work Ethic and Attitude: Builder mindset: low ego, fast iterating, always looking to unblock teams. Opinionated but collaborative - able to set a vision while inviting contribution.

• User Research Expertise: Solid grasp of user research methodologies and experience facilitating usability testing.

• Design System Experience: Experience building or contributing to design systems, including knowing when to push beyond existing components.

• Collaboration & Adaptability: Comfortable pairing with engineers and understanding front-end constraints across platforms; ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments.

Minimum Requirements:

• 6+ years of professional product design experience required, specifically designing digital products (web an