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're an engineer who ships. You might have a full-time role elsewhere, be freelancing, or be wrapping up a degree — but you want to spend some of your time building real AI systems, not just tutorials and toy projects.
We're looking for part-time or contract AI Engineers to work on well-scoped engineering projects. Each project has a clear deliverable and timeline, defined together upfront. The work is real — the code you write goes into production systems that enterprise clients use. We don't give collaborators busywork; if we're bringing you in, it's because we need your skills on something that matters.
What You'll Do
- Take ownership of a defined engineering scope — build it, test it, document it, and hand it off cleanly
- Write production-quality code that integrates with our existing systems and meets our engineering standards
- Collaborate asynchronously with the full-time team through code reviews, design docs, and weekly syncs
- Ship — we value working software over elaborate proposals
Representative projects
- Building a custom evaluation harness that runs LLM-generated outputs through a scoring pipeline and surfaces results in a dashboard
- Implementing a document processing workflow that extracts structured data from Japanese PDFs using LLM-based parsing with quality checks
- Adding a new tool integration to our agent framework — writing the adapter, adding error handling, and validating it against real-world usage patterns
- Building a prompt versioning and A/B testing system that lets the team compare model outputs across prompt iterations with automated quality scoring
You may be a good fit if you have
- Professional software engineering experience — you've written code that other people depend on
- Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript
- Familiarity with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or building AI-powered features
- The ability to pick up a codebase quickly and contribute without extensive hand-holding
- Reliability — you estimate accurately and communicate proactively when things change
- Availability of approximately 10–20 hours per week (flexible)
- English proficiency; Japanese is a plus
Candidates need not have
- A computer science degree — we care about what you've shipped, not where you studied
- Deep ML expertise — if you're a strong software engineer, you can learn the AI-specific parts on the job
- Experience with our specific tech stack — we'll get you oriented
- Prior freelance or contract experience — if you've shipped software in any context, that's what matters
How to Apply
Send an email to team@yodolabs.jp with the subject line "AI Engineer (Part-time) — [Your Name]". Please include:
- Your CV or resume
- A short description of your relevant experience and availability
- Links to your GitHub profile or portfolio
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.