Are you looking
To make meaningful changes at the fastest-growing tech company in Japan?
For a fair, highly flexible, inclusive working environment where anyone, regardless of their background, can make an impact?
To build the next bold idea in customer acquisition and revenue growth through conversational commerce technology
For a place where things are not just fast - but they happen now?

We Are Zeals - "Designing conversations. Driving conversions.
"Zeals is not another chatbot. Our automated chat solution and conversational technology change how consumers purchase or act online. Zeals converts customers who appear "unengaged" to become "valuable" through designed chat on Messaging Apps. Using AI-powered, human-designed conversation flows across chat platforms, Zeals enables brands to build personalized, automated conversations with their consumers and develop a deeper understanding of their preferences while creating a delightful, seamless shopping experience. Our last 3 years have been phenomenal. We have captured the heart of many businesses in Japan, with over 480 enterprises relying on our chat commerce offering to boost their mobile business


The goal is simple:
to "revolutionize hospitality on the Internet" by unlocking digital customer service experiences that were limited to physical stores previously

.
Just Getting Starte

d…With more than 480 enterprise companies worldwide already utilizing our product, we are perfectly poised to seize market share and fuel exponential growth in the US market, with an eye on global expansion.

Investors have taken note of our potential, leading us to recently secure nearly $40 million in funding, backed by Salesforce Venture

s.
AI/ML Engineer (Conversational

AI)
About Z
ealsZeals is on a mission to "Design Conversations. Drive Conversio
ns."We empower enterprises to deliver immersive shopping and customer-service experiences on popular messaging platforms through human centred AI. More than 480 Japanese brands already trust Zeals, and we recently secured a USD 33.8 million Series E round as we accelerate our global expans

ion.
Position Ove

rviewAs an AI/ML Engineer at Zeals you will design, build and optimise the machine learning models and underlying infrastructure that power our Conversational Commerce platform.

You are proficient in applying cutting edge LLMs, RAG pipelines, and vector search, alongside classical supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms for intent classification, recommendation, and user behavior prediction.

You will own the entire model lifecycle, data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment and online monitoring, and work closely with product, backend and data teams to convert state of the art research into reliable, scalable and secure production systems that keep our chatbots smarter, safer and more nat

ural.
What You
'll Do-AI / ML & NLP Research & Optimi
sationDesign, train and maintain LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector retrieval modules, and classical ML models (e.g. intent classification, recommendation, anomaly detec
tion).Build multilingual NLP components such as named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis and topic modelling for Japanese, Chinese and En
glish.
Apply prompt engineering, fine tuning, quantisation and distillation to maximise accuracy, latency and cost effic
iency.
Own the full model lifecycle data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation and iterative improv

ement.

• Production Deployment & Continuous D

eliveryPartner with backend, data engineering and product teams to deploy models on AWS / GCP with CI/CD, blue green or canary releases, online monitoring and A/B t
esting.
Build horizontally scalable training, inference and monitoring architectures (Docker / Kubernetes / serverless) to ensure high availability and low l
atency.
Orchestrate end to end ML pipelines with Airflow, Kubeflow or similar, and maintain a model registry & feature

store.

• Research & Technology

ScoutingTrack cutting edge AI/ML/NLP papers and open source projects; quickly prototype, benchmark and translate promising ideas into produc
t value.
Conduct offline and online experiments, reporting metrics such as , recall, latency and serving cost to guide roadmap de

cisions.

• Internal Tooling & Knowledg

e SharingBuild automated experimentation platforms, reproducible notebooks and evaluation da
shboards.
Author best practice documentation, code samples and tech talks to uplift team skills and drive a culture of continuous

learning.
Must Have Qual
ifications3+ years of hands on experience shipping AI/ML/NLP products, covering the full lifecycle from POC to p
roduction.
Proven expertise in RAG system design and implementation, integrating vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Qdrant, etc.) with LLM g
enerators.
Proven expertise in designing, testing, and optimizing scalable, reusable prompts for conversational AI app
lications.
Strong Python skills plus deep proficiency with PyTorch or T
ensorFlow.
Practical experience with cloud deployment and containerisation (Docker/Ku
bernetes).Solid data engineering fundamentals, designing efficient ETL pipelines, feature stores and data quality
controls.
Excellent technical communication in English; Japanese fluency

is a plus.
Nice to Have Qua

lificationsEnd to end MLOps experience:
model versioning, ML centric CI/CD, feature stores, monitoring and automated
retraining.
Track record optimising large scale LLM inference for speed or cost (quantisation, distillation, L
oRA, etc.).Background in conversational AI, voice interfaces or multilingua
l chatbots.
Hands on experience with privacy (PII protection), generative AI risk management or security
hardening.
Open source contributions, peer reviewed publications or an active tech
nical blog.
Familiarity with AWS Bedrock / SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, serverless architectures or GPU cluster cost op

timisation.
Don't just take our
word for it Zeals has received the LinkedIn Top Startups award twice in a row. We believe this is a testament to our growth and our ability to attract great talents–who could potentially be you

r colleague
Ready to roll u
p our sleevesWe're obsessed with bringing hospitality to everyone – whether it's our customers or you You're an individual with unique needs, and while we may not have ping-pong tables or all-you-can-drink espresso bars to offer, we promise you a once-in-a-lifetime experience and co-workers you'll be proud to brag about to your friends, family, or anyone you meet the next time you go out As an employer, we're ready to roll up our sleeves and change the status quo if it means making your exper
ience better.
Salary Range
:

competitivePerformance review:

twice a yearHolidays:
10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave

days per yearVisa support:
We sponsor visas for the rig

ht candidatesFlexible working:
Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work
from overseasHousing allowance (within 1.5KM away
from office)Club activ
ity allowanceTeam building allowance and Lu
nch allowanceZeals Bar (bi-monthly free flo

w beer party)
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