Forward Deployed Engineer, Japan - Remote

Role overview Embed with enterprise customers in Tokyo as part of a two-person pod alongside a dedicated Account Executive, architecting and shipping production systems on a global communications and AI network. The role is outcome-led, focused on real workloads such as AI contact centers, global communications, and enterprise inference rather than product demos. You will own the technical path from discovery through architecture, POC, and production go-live.

Responsibilities - Embed with enterprise customers to understand communications workflows, AI use cases, and integration challenges - Build and deploy custom implementations including AI Voice Assistants, voice, messaging, fax, wireless, and WebRTC integrations - Run and operate open-weight LLMs through hosted inference or self-hosted stacks, including deploying LiteLLM as a model gateway with routing, fallbacks, and virtual keys - Instrument LLM usage with cost tracking, caching, observability, and guardrails, and wire production observability for everything shipped - Lead POCs, pilots, and production launches from whiteboard to go-live, owning customer outcomes until stable - Collaborate with Product and Engineering to shape the roadmap based on field insights across Japan and APAC

Requirements - 3+ years building and shipping production software, including being on-call and debugging live systems - Proficiency in Python, Node.js or TypeScript, and Go, with comfort deploying containerized services on Kubernetes and managing secrets, config, and upgrades - Practical understanding of provider rate limits, timeouts, retries, streaming, token accounting, and concurrency failure modes - Hands-on experience wiring observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Graylog, or ELK - High-concurrency experience with Kafka, message queues, or event streams, and a track record of building APIs from scratch including auth, rate limiting, versioning, and idempotency - Customer-facing engineering experience with strong written and verbal English communication; Japanese language skills are a plus - Based in Tokyo or willing to relocate; hybrid with travel across Japan and APAC; must be legally authorized to work in Japan or eligible for sponsorship

Nice to have - Experience with AI voice assistants, STT/TTS, or LLM-based conversational systems, plus building domain-specific evaluation sets - Hands-on production experience with an LLM gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey, or Kong AI Gateway - Familiarity with open-weight and Japanese-language models including Swallow, PLaMo, ELYZA, and Rinna, plus inference engines like vLLM, SGLang, TGI, or Ollama - SQL proficiency, ETL and data wrangling experience, and CI/CD pipeline design - Background in telecom, CPaaS, or high-growth SaaS, plus experience with sovereign or on-prem cloud deployments under Japan/APAC regulatory frameworks - Security mindset covering IAM, encryption, and audit logging