Senior Data Engineer – Customer Data Platform (Founding)
- Tokyo
- Remote OK - Anywhere in Japan
- Full-time
- July 30, 2025
#1 on ProductHunt. Over 10,000 AI agents generated worldwide in just 3 months since launch – that's our voice AI agent platform "Omakase.ai."
Our motto: Always Be Launching. Elite global team, Work Super Hard, AI-driven development. Through these principles, we've achieved extraordinary growth at breakneck speed.
We've finally launched monetization and can see ARR on track to exceed $100K in our first month – we're confident we're on the trajectory for global domination. This is why we're hiring elite engineers to fight alongside us from Japan. Let's conquer the world together with a Japanese-born AI product!
Why This Role Exists
Omakase Voice AI turns voice‑first, LLM‑powered agents into genuine sales reps for e‑commerce brands. We hit #1 on Product Hunt and launched 10 k+ agents in three months—but real‑time data is still our oxygen. We’re hiring a founding data engineer to build the customer‑data platform that fuels our generative‑AI products—converting every click and conversation into actionable insight in seconds.
What You’ll Tackle in Your First 12 Months
- Design low‑latency pipelines – Build streaming and batch data flows in the cloud, choosing the technologies that best balance speed, reliability, and cost.
- Define our data contracts – Create the event‑tracking taxonomy and lightweight SDKs so every interaction is captured once and usable everywhere.
- Model customer identity & behavior – Deliver privacy‑safe schemas that unlock instant segmentation and personalization.
- Automate data quality – Put tests, lineage, and observability on autopilot so we can ship fast without breaking trust.
- Feed the AI agent in real time – Provide up‑to‑the‑second conversation context while the call is still live.
- Power insight loops – Build data flows that drive A/B tests, merchant dashboards, and product decisions.
- Expose clean APIs – Enable product and analytics users today—and future ML work—to self‑serve the insights they need.
Growth Opportunities
- Data architecture leadership – Shape the customer‑data roadmap and recommend build‑vs‑buy options alongside the co‑founding engineers.
- Compliance stewardship – Guide GDPR/CCPA/PIPL readiness and privacy best‑practices.
- Advanced modeling & ML foundations – Lead predictive analytics and personalization projects, and seed an in‑house ML capability as we mature.
- Team building – Hire and mentor future data engineers.
Must‑Haves
- 8+ years (ideally 10) building production data platforms.
- 2+ years with streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Streaming, or similar).
- Mastery of Python and SQL and at least one strongly typed language (Go, Java, or Scala).
- Cloud‑native experience (Docker/K8s or equivalent).
- Experience modeling data schemas for OLTP and OLAP workloads (relational, dimensional, graph).
- Clear English communication (Japanese welcome).
- Highly valued: hands‑on privacy/compliance work (GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS).
Nice‑to‑Haves
- Built or maintained a CDP or feature store.
- Conversational‑AI, recommender, or real‑time ML pipelines.
- Differential privacy / clean‑room techniques.
- Previous zero‑to‑one startup ride.
Our Current Footing → Possible Next Steps & Rationale*
Layer | Today (Prod) | Possible Next Steps & Rationale |
App | Ruby on Rails (Heroku) | Container‑based services |
Data Store | PostgreSQL, BigQuery | Scalable data warehouse or other store you recommend |
Orchestration | Heroku Scheduler | Workflow engine & analytics transforms (e.g., Airflow, Prefect, dbt) |
Streaming | — (batch only) | Your chosen streaming platform |
Processing | SQL & Python scripts | Distributed processing (e.g., Spark, Flink) |
Infrastructure | Heroku | AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines |
Technologies listed are illustrative—your evaluation will drive the final stack.
Team & Culture
- Two‑engineer founding core today; you’ll be the first dedicated data specialist.
- Weekly ship cycles, prod focus—Always Be Launching.
- High autonomy, minimal process.
- Shared on‑call until a formal rotation is set.
- We currently rely on best‑in‑class AI services (e.g., LLM APIs) rather than running our own models—you’ll help lay the groundwork to bring key ML capabilities in‑house over time.
- English‑first docs; JP speakers welcome.
Benefits & Working Conditions
- Hybrid in Tokyo (expect heavier office presence during major launches).
- Full social insurance, ¥20 k transport allowance, ¥20 k housing allowance (if eligible).
- JP national holidays, paid leave, summer break, year‑end/New Year, refresh leave.
Interview Process
Application → HR chat → Technical deep dive → CEO interview → Team panel → Offer
About Omakase.ai
Revolutionizing sales with "Omakase.ai" – because chatbots suck.
While traditional chatbots just answer questions, Agentic Voice AI agents actually close sales. Omakase.ai’s voice-powered sales agents work like real sales reps – persuasive, helpful, and always on-brand. They provide live product recommendations during conversations, offer conversation analytics to understand customer behavior, and use a smarter scraping engine that learns any website instantly with zero setup required.
Omakase.ai is a product of Zeals. Check out their company profile here for more information!
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