At Sakana AI, we are turning world-class AI research into products used by real users and enterprise customers, including Sakana Chat, Marlin, Fugu, and Namazu. These products are becoming core ways for our research to reach production environments at scale.
In this role, you will join the PD Team and own the reliability of our products and the production inference platform behind them. You will work across cloud infrastructure, GPU resources, LLM serving, SLA management, monitoring, incident response, cost optimization, and enterprise non-functional requirements.
Key Responsibilities
- Own reliability and SLA management across Sakana AI products, including Sakana Chat, Marlin, Fugu, and Namazu.
- Own production inference infrastructure for our LLM products, improving reliability, latency, throughput, GPU utilization, and cost efficiency.
- Operate LLM serving systems and support safe deployment and rollback workflows.
- Build monitoring, alerting, incident response, postmortems, and prevention practices, and participate in the on-call rotation.
- Translate enterprise security, availability, compliance, and SLA needs into infrastructure design.
- Support capacity planning and cost management, and provide technical requirements and capacity forecasts to the business team responsible for GPU and cloud procurement.
- Collaborate within a global team that works in both Japanese and English.
Required Qualifications
- Experience designing and operating production infrastructure in a cloud environment such as AWS or GCP.
- Experience operating containerized services, APIs, batch jobs, or model inference workloads in production.
- Experience managing and automating infrastructure with IaC or comparable tooling.
- Hands-on experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems.
- Ability to reason about GPU, cloud, and serving resource usage from cost, performance, and availability perspectives.
- Experience with LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang.
- English communication skills sufficient to drive technical projects with internal and external stakeholders, including discussions around requirements, cost, capacity, and priorities.
- Japanese language ability (if you are a native speaker or have passed JLPT N1/N2, please mention this in your application).
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience designing or operating production inference infrastructure for LLMs or machine learning models.
- Experience with Kubernetes, GKE, Vertex AI, Terraform, or comparable infrastructure tooling.
- Experience building or operating GPU clusters, especially NVIDIA H100/B200-class environments.
- Expertise in inference optimization techniques such as quantization, speculative decoding, and PD disaggregation.
- Knowledge of SRE practices, SLO design, capacity planning, or enterprise infrastructure.
Who We Are Looking For
- You can translate research and product needs into reliable production infrastructure.
- You optimize for latency, reliability, cost, operability, and product value.
- You are comfortable reading backend or inference pipeline code when needed.
- You can work effectively with business stakeholders on cost, capacity, and procurement decisions.
- Please submit your CV and cover letter in English.
- As mentioned, when applying for this role, please select the Software Engineer (Product, Infrastructure and Platform Reliability) option in Google Forms, and make sure that in your cover letter, explicitly write that you are applying for the βSoftware Engineer (Product, Infrastructure and Platform Reliability)β role to be considered for this position.