About Yodo Labs

Yodo Labs is an applied AI research and engineering company based in Tokyo and Osaka. We help enterprises take their most difficult AI projects from prototype to production. Our team includes PhDs and industry researchers working across the full AI stack.

About the Role

You've built with LLMs and you know the difference between a demo that impresses and a system that holds up. You've hit the walls — the hallucinations that only appear in production, the evaluation that doesn't catch what matters, the agent that works beautifully until the third tool call. And instead of moving on to the next prototype, you wanted to fix it.

At Yodo Labs, engineering and research sit side by side. As an AI Engineer, you will take research prototypes and turn them into systems that enterprise clients depend on. You'll make architecture decisions that determine whether an AI product is reliable or fragile. You'll build the evaluation infrastructure that tells us whether our systems actually work — not just on benchmarks, but on real client tasks.

This is a full-stack role in the truest sense: you might be writing a Next.js frontend in the morning, debugging a retrieval pipeline after lunch, and optimizing model serving costs before end of day. We're a small team, and every engineer has outsized impact.

What You'll Do

Own production AI systems end-to-end — from architecture design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration
Work directly with research scientists to translate experimental approaches into production-ready code — often within the same week
Build and maintain our evaluation infrastructure: the tests, benchmarks, and monitoring that tell us whether the system is getting better or worse
Make the hard tradeoff calls — latency vs. quality, cost vs. reliability, speed-to-ship vs. robustness — with real client needs as the deciding factor
Contribute to technical architecture decisions, and be prepared to revisit them when the evidence says you were wrong

Representative projects

Building an agent orchestration framework that handles graceful degradation when individual tool calls fail, with automatic retry logic and fallback strategies
Designing a client-facing evaluation dashboard that lets non-technical users compare LLM outputs across prompt versions with human-in-the-loop feedback
Migrating a RAG pipeline from a naive chunking strategy to a hybrid retrieval approach, measuring the impact on answer quality for Japanese enterprise documents
Implementing a cost-optimization layer for multi-model routing — sending simple queries to smaller models and complex ones to frontier models, with quality guarantees

You may be a good fit if you have

Professional software engineering experience with production systems — you've shipped code that real users depend on
Strong proficiency in Python and TypeScript — our stack uses both, and you'll context-switch between them daily
Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications: prompt engineering, RAG, agents, or fine-tuning
The instinct to measure before you optimize — you build the evaluation first, then improve the system
Comfort with ambiguity in a small team — sometimes the right architecture doesn't exist yet, and you'll need to invent it
Enough product sense to talk directly with clients about what they need, not just what's technically interesting
Business-level English; Japanese is helpful but not required

Candidates need not have

Years of ML/AI-specific experience — strong software engineers who are excited about AI pick things up fast
A computer science degree — we care about what you've built, not where you studied
Experience with our exact stack — if you've shipped production software, you can learn Next.js or Supabase

How to Apply

Send an email to team@yodolabs.jp with the subject line "AI Engineer (Full-time) — [Your Name]". Please include:

Your CV or resume
A brief description of a system you've built that you're proud of — AI-related or not, we want to understand how you think about engineering
Links to your GitHub profile or relevant project repositories

Logistics

Location: Tokyo / Osaka, Japan — remote-friendly Work style: Flexible hours; we value output over presence Visa sponsorship: We sponsor work visas for Japan where possible

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification listed.