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 have your own research agenda — at a university, a lab, or in industry — but you're curious about what happens when AI meets production constraints. You want to see your ideas tested against real systems, not just benchmarks.
We're looking for part-time or contract Research Scientists to collaborate on focused research projects. You'll work on scoped problems that matter to our production systems, with clear milestones we define together. This is not grunt work — the problems we bring to collaborators are genuinely open questions we haven't solved internally.
This arrangement works well for academics and PhD candidates who want industry exposure without leaving their program, industry researchers exploring applied AI on the side, or anyone who finds the gap between "works in a paper" and "works in production" intellectually interesting.
What You'll Do
- Take on a scoped research project with clear deliverables — typically a 2–3 month engagement, renewable
- Design and run experiments that validate (or invalidate) approaches we're considering for production systems
- Write up findings as internal technical reports, and co-author external papers where results are publishable
- Join weekly research syncs to share progress and get feedback from the full-time team
- Collaborate asynchronously — we're built for this, with strong documentation and async communication practices
Representative projects
- Running a systematic comparison of chunking strategies for retrieval-augmented generation on Japanese business documents, measuring recall and downstream answer quality
- Evaluating whether chain-of-thought prompting improves or degrades structured extraction tasks across different model families
- Prototyping an automated evaluation pipeline for multi-turn agent conversations and validating it against human judgments
- Investigating domain adaptation strategies for enterprise use cases where labeled data is scarce
You may be a good fit if you have
- Active research experience — as a PhD candidate, postdoc, or industry researcher with demonstrable output
- Strong experimental skills and comfort with rapid prototyping in Python
- Experience with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation methodology, or agentic systems
- Genuine curiosity about applied problems — you find "why does this break in production?" as interesting as "how do we improve the state-of-the-art?"
- Ability to manage your own time and deliver within agreed timelines — we don't micromanage
- Availability of approximately 10–20 hours per week (flexible)
- English proficiency; Japanese is a plus
Candidates need not have
- A PhD or formal degree — strong research output and experimental skills matter more than credentials
- Prior industry or consulting experience — we'll onboard you to our systems and workflows
- Expertise in the exact research area of the project — we value strong research fundamentals over topic match
- Fluent Japanese — our research team operates primarily in English
How to Apply
Send an email to team@yodolabs.jp with the subject line "Research Scientist (Part-time) — [Your Name]". Please include:
- Your CV or resume
- A short description of your current research focus and availability
- Links to relevant publications or projects
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.