AI/ML Engineer

Summary

Join Zeals, a rapidly growing tech company in Japan, and make a significant impact in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology. As an AI/ML Engineer, you will design, build, and optimize machine learning models and infrastructure for our platform. You will be involved in the entire model lifecycle, from data collection to deployment and monitoring. Collaborate with product, backend, and data teams to translate cutting-edge research into reliable and scalable production systems. Zeals offers a fair, highly flexible, and inclusive work environment with opportunities for professional growth and development. We are seeking a skilled engineer with experience in LLMs, RAG pipelines, and vector search, along with expertise in classical ML algorithms.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands on experience shipping AI/ML/NLP products, covering the full lifecycle from POC to production
• Proven expertise in RAG system design and implementation , integrating vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Qdrant, etc.) with LLM generators
• Proven expertise in designing, testing, and optimizing scalable, reusable prompts for conversational AI applications
• Strong Python skills plus deep proficiency with PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Practical experience with cloud deployment and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Solid data engineering fundamentals, designing efficient ETL pipelines, feature stores and data quality controls
• Excellent technical communication in English; Japanese fluency is a plus

Responsibilities

• Design, train and maintain LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector retrieval modules , and classical ML models (e.g. intent classification, recommendation, anomaly detection)
• Build multilingual NLP components such as named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis and topic modelling for Japanese, Chinese and English
• Apply prompt engineering, fine tuning, quantisation and distillation to maximise accuracy, latency and cost efficiency
• Own the full model lifecycle data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation and iterative improvement
• Partner with backend, data engineering and product teams to deploy models on AWS / GCP with CI/CD, blue green or canary releases, online monitoring and A/B testing
• Build horizontally scalable training, inference and monitoring architectures (Docker / Kubernetes / serverless) to ensure high availability and low latency
• Orchestrate end to end ML pipelines with Airflow, Kubeflow or similar , and maintain a model registry & feature store
• Track cutting edge AI/ML/NLP papers and open source projects; quickly prototype, benchmark and translate promising ideas into product value
• Conduct offline and online experiments, reporting metrics such as precision@k, recall, latency and serving cost to guide roadmap decisions
• Build automated experimentation platforms, reproducible notebooks and evaluation dashboards
• Author best practice documentation, code samples and tech talks to uplift team skills and drive a culture of continuous learning

Preferred Qualifications

• End to end MLOps experience: model versioning, ML centric CI/CD, feature stores, monitoring and automated retraining
• Track record optimising large scale LLM inference for speed or cost (quantisation, distillation, LoRA, etc.)
• Background in conversational AI, voice interfaces or multilingual chatbots
• Hands on experience with privacy (PII protection), generative AI risk management or security hardening
• Open source contributions, peer reviewed publications or an active technical blog
• Familiarity with AWS Bedrock / SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, serverless architectures or GPU cluster cost optimisation

Benefits

• 10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave days per year
• Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates
• Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work from overseas
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office)
• Club activity allowance
• Team building allowance and Lunch allowance
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party)