The Mission
Sakana AI is an AI R&D company based in Tokyo, pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence through pioneering research. Our Platform team is building the critical infrastructure required to deploy world-class foundation models and autonomous agents into highly secure, real-world environments — serving Japan’s largest enterprises and government institutions, including national security and defense.
As a Software Engineer in the Platform team, you will be a core contributor to the agentic infrastructure that powers this mission. You will work at the intersection of AI research and production systems, helping bridge the gap between the lab and the physical world.
Candidates will be expected to be physically based in Tokyo, but we will provide assistance with the Visa application process if needed.
The Role & Responsibilities
- Agent Infrastructure: Design and build the systems and tooling that enable LLM-based agents to operate reliably, securely, and at scale across Sakana AI’s enterprise deployments.
- Data Platform Engineering: Contribute to a unified data platform that serves as the foundation for ingestion, enrichment, modeling, and agent-ready data interfaces.
- Evaluation Systems: Build and maintain evaluation pipelines that measure agent performance in both offline and online settings, enabling continuous improvement of deployed systems.
- Platform Reliability: Ensure the platform meets the stringent security, governance, and data-sovereignty requirements of enterprise, government, and defense customers.
Qualifications and Skills
- Technical Foundation: 3+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production-grade systems. Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and API design.
- Backend & Systems Engineering: Proficiency in one or more backend languages (Python, Go, TypeScript, etc.). Experience building reliable, observable, and maintainable services at scale.
- AI/ML Infrastructure Awareness: Familiarity with LLM-based systems, agent architectures, or ML pipelines. You understand the unique operational demands of AI-driven workloads.
- Data Engineering: Experience working with data pipelines, data modeling, or analytics infrastructure. You appreciate the role clean, well-structured data plays in system quality.
- Ownership Mindset: You take end-to-end accountability for your work from design through deployment and iteration. You don’t wait to be told what to do next.
- Language Proficiency: Professional level English proficiency is required, and conversational level or higher Japanese proficiency is a strong plus.
- Document Submission: Please submit both your CV and Cover Letter in English.
- Technical Evaluation: Candidates who pass the document screening will be asked to complete a technical assessment.
- How to Apply: * Please select “Software Engineer” on the Google Form.
- Clearly state in your Cover Letter that you are applying for the Software Engineer (Platform) position.
- Employment Types: In addition to Full-time roles, we also accept applications for:
- Contract/Freelance (minimum 24 hours per week)
- Internships (minimum 2 months duration, at least 24 hours per week)