Site Reliability Engineer

Tokyo
Partial Remote
Full-time
July 22, 2026

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.

About the role

At ZEALS, we're building the infrastructure behind the next generation of conversational AI products.

Our conversational commerce platform processes millions of customer conversations every day on a high-volume, event-driven system built from dozens of microservices. In parallel, we're rapidly expanding Omakase.ai, our new AI agent platform, and developing deeper integrations between our products to unlock new capabilities and use cases.

Joining the SRE team means more than maintaining production systems—you'll help shape the infrastructure that powers multiple AI products. From improving reliability and performance to enabling new feature development and platform integrations, you'll have the opportunity to work on challenging, large-scale engineering problems while influencing the future architecture of our services.

Who you are

You can discuss systems architecture as a whole and how its components interact before diving into detail, and you can confidently walk stakeholders and colleagues through how you reached a conclusion.
You love to solve problems. You find the root cause of issues and stay on an error until you understand it, not just until it goes away or resort to guesswork.
Calm under pressure in an incident, you follow a problem across the whole stack rather than stopping at the first suspicious layer.
Proactive in adding value where you can identify it. You spot toil and weak spots, validate the real need, and bring a proposed solution before executing. Being pragmatic is critical: your time is valuable, and we want what we release to have a tangible impact on our system and our developers.
A team player: affable, empathetic, and understanding with our developers. Eager to learn and get involved, as well as holding others accountable.

What you'll do

Keep critical customer journeys reliable and available, and respond first when they aren't.
Join the on-call rotation for business critical services.
Own alerting and observability: better coverage, fewer false positives, and catching issues before customers do.
Build and operate in-house platform tooling: Kubernetes operators, custom Kubernetes APIs, GitOps automation, and deployment tooling that helps teams ship faster and safer.
Eliminate toil by turning recurring developer requests into self-service, bringing an automation mindset to reduce complexity.
Drive down platform cost without trading away reliability.
Design infrastructure that scales with bursty, high-volume traffic, managed as code across many environments.
Measure the platform against Well-Architected principles and act on what's weak, whether that's a reliability gap, an oversized resource, or a manual process worth automating.

What you'll need

3+ years in software engineering, SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering on GCP or AWS.
Hands-on Kubernetes experience: you can debug a workload, not just deploy one.
Monitoring and observability experience (we use Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and Thanos).
Comfortable troubleshooting databases (we run MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Postgres).
CI/CD and GitOps experience (we use GitHub Actions, Helm, and Argo CD).
Able to write and read code for tooling and automation (we use Go, Bash, and Python).
Eligible to work in Japan, and business-level English.

What makes you stand out

Terraform and infrastructure-as-code at scale.
Go proficiency and experience building Kubernetes operators.
Operating event-driven systems and high-throughput messaging at scale.

Conversational Japanese.

APPLY NOW ➜

About ZEALS

Build AI that Brings Japanese Omotenashi to the World

ZEALS is an AI company building intelligent products inspired by the Japanese concept of Omotenashi—anticipating people's needs and delivering exceptional experiences. What began as Japan's leading conversational commerce platform has evolved into an AI-native company developing products across autonomous AI agents and robotics.

Today, ZEALS operates three core businesses:

ZEALS AI Engagement, helping enterprise companies deliver personalized customer experiences through AI.
Omakase.ai, a platform for building autonomous AI agents capable of understanding, communicating, and taking action across voice and chat.
Omakase Robotics, developing a robot-agnostic AI operating system that enables robots to work naturally alongside people in real-world environments.

Together, these businesses share a single mission: creating AI that understands people, acts autonomously, and brings the spirit of Japanese hospitality to both digital and physical experiences.

From Market Leader to AI Pioneer

ZEALS established itself as the market leader in conversational commerce in Japan, working with hundreds of enterprise customers across industries including retail, beauty, travel, finance, and automotive.

Building on years of experience designing AI-powered customer interactions, the company has expanded into generative AI and embodied AI. Omakase.ai quickly gained international recognition after launching as the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, with thousands of AI agents created by users within its first months. Meanwhile, Omakase Robotics is applying the same AI capabilities to the physical world, developing software that enables robots to perform meaningful work in human environments.

With teams spanning AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, robotics, and product engineering, ZEALS continues to invest aggressively in technologies that shape the future of intelligent systems.

Building the Future of AI

Rather than treating AI as a feature, ZEALS builds products where AI is the core technology. Engineers work across a wide range of challenging technical domains, including:

Autonomous AI agents
Voice AI and multimodal interaction
Large Language Models (LLMs)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Distributed cloud infrastructure
Robotics software
Computer vision
Real-time systems

Small, highly autonomous teams own products end-to-end, from research and prototyping to deployment and continuous iteration. Engineers collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and AI researchers to rapidly ship new capabilities and solve real-world customer problems.

A Place to Grow

ZEALS has built a culture around ownership, rapid learning, and continuous experimentation. Employees are encouraged to challenge assumptions, move quickly, and take responsibility for delivering meaningful outcomes. The company also supports collaboration beyond day-to-day work through cross-functional lunches, club activities, social events, and opportunities to connect across teams.

Japanese Language Policy
At ZEALS, the product and technology team members primarily speak English (dev-related discussions happen in English on Github or Slack). There might be occasional discussions in Japanese, but most Slack messages are in English (or both languages).

As for meetings, all dev-related discussions take place in English. Given the above, Japanese skills are not required for most positions in the Product & Technology departments. However, one unique aspect of ZEALS’ culture is the desire to increase teamwork and engage with each other, which is why many Japanese members are working on their English skills while many non-Japanese members also work to improve their Japanese skills.

In order to build a truly global team, ZEALS has many multilingual members that proactively support the rest of the team to ensure smooth communications.

Even outside of the Product & Technology departments, all important company-wide announcements are made in both English and Japanese. For example, hiring announcements, new product launches etc. are generally announced in both Japanese and English.

Also, simultaneous interpretation for presentations at large meetings and events is provided to ensure that everyone gets the information they need.
Paid Leave
- All Japanese public holidays off
- 10 days of PTO (awarded 3 months after joining) in the first year
- 5 refreshment leave days per year
- Summer Holidays, Year-end Holidays, Childcare Leave, Congratulations/Bereavement Leave
Benefits
Here are some examples of the benefits which full-time employees can receive:

💻 Loaned Laptops

🇯🇵 Translation Support (EN<>JP)

👶 Shorter Work Hours for Employees Taking Care of Children

👶 Parental Leave

👕 Flexible Dress Code

💜 Social Security / Insurance Benefits Included

🏥 Healthcare Insurance, Periodic Health Checks

💚 Pension Insurance

🚃 Commuter Reimbursement
Remote Work
Although ZEALS requires you to either be in or relocate to Japan, once you’re here, you can choose whether you work from home or in the office.
- Full-time employees in Japan can work from home or come to the office. Transportation reimbursement to and from the office is available and people living close to the office can receive a housing allowance.
- If you’re not based in Japan yet, you can work from overseas while we help you obtain a Japanese working visa.
- Work from your home country 2 months per year.
Work style
ZEALS is flexible when it comes to working hours. They have core time from 1:00pm to 3:00pm JST, but otherwise you’re free to set up your day however you want to meet the monthly working hour requirements.
Values

FROM ZEAL

< Passion >
Good things come from giving it your all

BET ON PARADOX

< Unorthodox >
Never settle for the established norm

UNITED WILL

< Team >
Teamwork is the heart of achievement

Office

The ZEALS office is in the heart of Tokyo, situated in Meguro, near Gajoen, a famous hotel known for hospitality. You can work from the office at a desk as well as use small booths or meeting rooms. You can hook your laptop to large screens and sit in Ergohuman chairs. Lounge areas and standing tables are also available. Everyone is free to choose the work style that works best for them, either full-remote or in the office.