Forward Deployed Engineer

Sakana AI is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with our most strategic customers, embedding with their teams to understand their unique challenges and build custom AI solutions that deliver measurable business value. You will be the technical face of Sakana AI in the field — part engineer, part consultant, part trusted advisor — working with some of the most sophisticated technology organizations in Japan and globally.

No two weeks will look the same. One engagement might have you designing a custom model merging pipeline for a financial services firm that needs to combine domain-specific models with general-purpose capabilities. The next might involve optimizing inference latency for a manufacturing company deploying our models on edge devices in factory environments. You will context-switch between different industries, technical stacks, and problem domains, always finding the fastest path from customer pain point to working solution.

What makes this role special at Sakana AI is the technology you bring to these engagements. Our nature-inspired approach to model development gives you a unique toolkit: you can evolve custom model architectures for specific use cases, merge existing models to combine capabilities, and leverage our evolutionary optimization techniques to solve problems that conventional fine-tuning approaches struggle with.

We are looking for versatile engineers who are excellent communicators, comfortable with ambiguity, and energized by variety. You should be the kind of person who can walk into a room of skeptical enterprise architects, understand their constraints in 30 minutes, and have a working prototype by end of day.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in a customer-facing or consulting role
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one systems language (Go, Rust, C++)
• Hands-on experience with ML model deployment, inference optimization, and production ML systems
• Excellent communication and presentation skills
• Ability to rapidly understand new domains, technical requirements, and business constraints
• Comfort with travel within Japan and occasionally internationally to customer sites
• Experience in technical consulting, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed engineering a strong plus