AI/ML Engineer (Conversational AI)

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 Started…

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 Ventures.

AI/ML Engineer (Conversational AI)

About Zeals

Zeals is on a mission to “Design Conversations. Drive Conversions.”
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 expansion.

Position Overview

As 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 natural.

What You’ll Do

• AI / ML & NLP Research & Optimisation
• Design, train and maintain LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector retrieval modules, and classical ML models (e.g. intent classification, recommendation, anomaly detection).
• Build multilingual NLP components such as named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis and topic modelling for Japanese, Chinese and English.
• Apply prompt engineering, fine tuning, quantisation and distillation to maximise accuracy, latency and cost efficiency.
• Own the full model lifecycle data collection, feature engineering, training, evaluation and iterative improvement.
• Production Deployment & Continuous Delivery
• Partner 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 testing.
• Build horizontally scalable training, inference and monitoring architectures (Docker / Kubernetes / serverless) to ensure high availability and low latency.
• Orchestrate end to end ML pipelines with Airflow, Kubeflow or similar, and maintain a model registry & feature store.

• Research & Technology Scouting
• Track cutting edge AI/ML/NLP papers and open source projects; quickly prototype, benchmark and translate promising ideas into product value.
• Conduct offline and online experiments, reporting metrics such as precision@k, recall, latency and serving cost to guide roadmap decisions.
• Internal Tooling & Knowledge Sharing
• Build automated experimentation platforms, reproducible notebooks and evaluation dashboards.
• Author best practice documentation, code samples and tech talks to uplift team skills and drive a culture of continuous learning.

Must Have Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience shipping AI/ML/NLP products, covering the full lifecycle from POC to production.
• Proven expertise in RAG system design and implementation, integrating vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Qdrant, etc.) with LLM generators.
• Proven expertise in designing, testing, and optimizing scalable, reusable prompts for conversational AI applications.
• Strong Python skills plus deep proficiency with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Practical experience with cloud deployment and containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes).
• 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 Qualifications

• End-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, LoRA, etc.).
• Background in conversational AI, voice interfaces or multilingual chatbots.
• Hands-on experience with privacy (PII protection), generative AI risk management, or security hardening.
• Open source contributions, peer reviewed publications or an active technical blog.
• Familiarity with AWS Bedrock / SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, serverless architectures or GPU cluster cost optimisation.

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 your colleague! 

Ready to roll up our sleeves

We'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 experience better.

• Salary Range : competitive
• Performance review: twice a year
• Holidays: 10 days of annual leave in the first year, weekends off, national holidays, summer and winter breaks, and 5 refreshment leave days per year
• Visa support: We sponsor visas for the right candidates
• Flexible working: Highly flexible, remote-first organization (in Japan), Interim work from overseas
• Housing allowance (within 1.5KM away from office)
• Club activity allowance
• Team building allowance and Lunch allowance
• Zeals Bar (bi-monthly free flow beer party)