{"id":2842844,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cogent-labs-ai-engineer","title":"AI Engineer","company":{"id":7502,"name":"Cogent Labs","domain":"cogent.co.jp","url":"https://alion.io/company/cogent-labs","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Breezy","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Japan"],"countries":["JP"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LoRA","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true},{"name":"PEFT","optional":true},{"name":"QLoRA","optional":true},{"name":"SFT","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-19T06:58:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-19","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T13:32:16Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"AI Engineer\nHybrid, Tokyo · Full-time · Founding team · Visa sponsorship available · Early-career to mid-level · Start ASAP\nCogent AI is an AI-native startup spun out of Cogent Labs, building Document AI, AI agents and deterministic systems for enterprises. We're hiring an AI Engineer to work on LLM agents, coding agents and AI evaluation. Coding agents like Claude Code write essentially all of our production code, so our engineers focus on what matters most: choosing the right problems, designing the architecture, building the agent harnesses and evals that make AI output trustworthy, and shipping a product customers rely on.\nThis is a hybrid AI engineering role based in Tokyo. It's a great fit for early-career to mid-level engineers who want to learn fast and grow with a founding team. Whether your background is software engineering, ML engineering, backend, platform or LLM application development, if you've been building with AI agents and want to help define how a company builds software with them, we'd love to meet you.\nWhy you might love this role\nYou'll shape how the company builds. The harnesses and evals you design become the foundation every product runs on.\nYou'll work on genuinely open problems. Making autonomous coding reliable, and building benchmarks where none exist, are problems the whole industry is still figuring out.\nYou'll own outcomes end to end. From design to a production system, with real influence over technical and product direction.\nYou'll have the tools. Claude Code is our primary environment, and Codex, Cursor Agent and similar tools are welcome. We provide compute for experiments.\nCredentials don't matter here. We care about what you can build and how you think, not where you studied or worked.\nWhat you'll work on\nCoding-agent harnesses. Design the environments agents work in: context packaging, tools, permissions, checkpoints, task delegation, resumability, traces, independent review and automated validation.\nSpecialized eval harnesses. Build domain benchmarks from scratch: gold cases, hard negatives, adversarial scenarios, grading logic, human calibration, trajectory checks and regression gates that catch problems before customers do.\nEnterprise AI products. Turn customer needs into dependable Document AI and agent products that combine LLMs with deterministic systems, from scope and design through production monitoring and iteration.\nModel work, where it pays off. Fine-tuning experiments, model comparisons, data curation and inference economics, when they make the product better.\nApplied research. When a new paper or technique looks promising, you'll dig into how it actually works, test it against simple baselines and decide whether it earns a place in the product.\nOur stack\nTypeScript and Node.js on AWS and Google Cloud, with Claude Code as our primary coding-agent environment, plus Codex, Cursor and similar tools. We're not dogmatic: when a problem calls for a different language, framework or cloud, we use it.\nWhat we're looking for\nYou don't need to tick every box. If you have the core experience below and are excited to learn the rest, please apply. We'll help you grow into the deeper agent and evaluation work.\nWhat you'll need\nSerious coding-agent use. You use coding agents like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor heavily in your own work, well beyond autocomplete, and you have opinions about what makes them reliable or unreliable.\nSoftware engineering experience. You've built and shipped production software, ideally in TypeScript and Node.js, and you're comfortable reviewing code you didn't write, including code written by agents. Strong engineers from other languages are very welcome.\nHands-on experience building with LLMs. You've built something real with LLM APIs: an agent, a tool, an automated workflow or an internal app.\nCuriosity about whether AI actually works. You care whether outputs are correct, not just impressive in a demo, and you want to get better at testing and evaluating them.\nOwnership. You enjoy taking a problem from idea to production without needing every step spelled out.\nNice to have (we'll help you learn these)\nDesigning agent harnesses: context management, tool use, permissions, checkpoints, resumability or tracing.\nBuilding evaluation sets or benchmarks: gold cases, grading rubrics, LLM-as-judge, regression testing.\nFine-tuning experience (SFT, LoRA, QLoRA or similar) or training small transformer models.\nReproducing or critically evaluating machine learning research.\nCloud infrastructure, security or production monitoring for AI systems.\nStartup or early-stage team experience.\nCommunication\nYou write and speak English fluently and enjoy working with international colleagues, including Japanese stakeholders who speak English as an additional language. Careful listening and checking for shared understanding matter more to us than accent.\nWhat we don't require\nNo particular degree, university, PhD, minimum years of experience, big-name employer, publications, Japanese fluency or personal GPU setup. You don't need to have trained a frontier model. What matters is demonstrable practical fundamentals and a track record of learning fast.\nHow we work\nWe're a very small team, so priorities shift as the product evolves, and we move quickly toward commercial deadlines. In return, you get short paths from idea to production, real influence over how we build, and teammates who value careful evidence over hype. We especially appreciate people who make everyone faster by building reusable tools and infrastructure.\nWhat we offer\nVisa sponsorship for candidates relocating to Japan.\nPaid AI tool subscriptions: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and similar.\nA compute budget for experiments and fine-tuning.\nFlexible hours, with core hours of 11:00 to 16:00 JST.\nHybrid work between our Tokyo office and home.\nReady to apply?\nIf you're a software engineer or AI engineer excited about LLM agents, AI coding tools and making AI systems reliable, we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't check every box. We're hiring now and hope to have someone start as soon as possible.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6116,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Japanese","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":true},{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":true}]},"benefits":["Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Japan","iso":"JP","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Multimodal AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-19T09:45:40Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":32,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T15:43:11Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cogent-labs-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cogent-labs-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T15:43:11Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11658,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7502},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7502"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcogent-labs-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcogent-labs-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcogent-labs-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cogent-labs-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcogent-labs-ai-engineer"}]}