{"id":1897444,"url":"https://alion.io/job/starley-lead-aiml-engineer","title":"Lead AI/ML Engineer","company":{"id":3900829,"name":"Starley","domain":"starley.co.jp","url":"https://alion.io/company/starley","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Tokyo, Japan"],"countries":["JP"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":9000000,"max":null,"currency":"JPY","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":57474},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"LLM","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-05T09:00:48Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-10-05T09:00:48Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"About Cotomo\nCotomo is a Japan-based AI Character and AI Novel platform with more than 2 million users.\nWe are building a new form of consumer AI centered around characters, conversations, stories, and long-term relationships between humans and AI.\nOur ambition is not limited to Japan. We are building Cotomo to become a globally competitive consumer AI platform.\nCotomo is a venture-backed startup supported by some of Japan’s leading venture capital firms, and we are entering the next stage of growth as we expand both our product and organization globally.\nAbout the Role\nWe are looking for an ML Tech Lead to own Cotomo’s ML stack end-to-end - from experimentation and post-training to evaluation, inference, deployment, and infrastructure.\nOur product uses a broad range of models across LLMs, ASR, TTS, image and video generation, and other multimodal systems. You will work across these technologies as the product evolves, rather than being tied to a single model or modality.\nThis is primarily an individual contributor role, not a traditional management position. You will spend most of your time building, experimenting, debugging, and shipping yourself, while also serving as the technical lead for our small ML team.\nThis is also not a pure research role. Our goal is to build the best possible product, not to build models in-house for their own sake.\nDepending on the problem, the best solution may be an internally trained model, an open-weight model, a frontier API, or a combination of them. We expect you to make those decisions based on actual product quality, latency, reliability, and cost.\nHow We Work\nCotomo is a small, ambitious team operating with a high level of intensity and ownership.\nResponsibilities are intentionally broad, and difficult problems are rarely confined to a single layer of the stack. In the same week, you might improve a conversational model, investigate a speech pipeline, integrate a new generative model, optimize GPU utilization, compare an external API with an in-house model, and work with Product on a new user experience.\nThis can be a demanding environment. It is best suited to people who enjoy high-intensity startup environments, substantial autonomy, and being personally responsible for important outcomes.\nWhat You’ll Own\nOwn Cotomo’s ML stack end-to-end across language, speech, image, video, and multimodal models\nImprove conversational quality, personality, memory, personalization, latency, reliability, and cost\nBuild and improve training, post-training, evaluation, and experimentation pipelines\nEvaluate and A/B test frontier APIs, open-weight models, and in-house models, making pragmatic decisions based on product quality and unit economics\nOwn production ML systems, including model serving, GPU infrastructure, observability, and cost optimization\nWork closely with Product and Engineering to turn new model capabilities into measurable user impact\nProvide technical direction, reviews, and hands-on support for our small ML team\nWhat We’re Looking For\n4+ years of full-time professional experience in machine learning, AI, or a closely related engineering role\nYou’ve built and operated production ML systems and are comfortable owning them beyond the experimentation stage\nYou have a strong understanding of modern deep learning and LLM systems across training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and inference\nStrong software engineering skills come naturally to you, including working with GPU-based ML infrastructure\nAmbiguous technical problems don’t need to be fully scoped before you start - you can define the problem, make trade-offs, and drive it through to production\nYou think in terms of product outcomes, not just model benchmarks\nYou’re pragmatic about architecture and are equally comfortable choosing an external API, an open-weight model, or an in-house solution when it is the best fit\nYou can set technical direction and raise the bar for a small team while remaining primarily a hands-on individual contributor\nNice to Have\nWe’re especially interested if you have worked on:\nConversational AI, AI companions, character AI, voice AI, or other consumer AI products\nASR, TTS, image generation, video generation, or other multimodal systems\nPost-training, preference optimization, reinforcement learning, synthetic data, or personalization\nDistributed training or large-scale inference systems\nLatency, reliability, and cost optimization for production ML\nStaff, Principal, Lead, or senior Research/ML Engineer-level technical ownership\nYou’ll Thrive Here If\nYou enjoy staying close to the work and moving across boundaries when the problem requires it.\nYou’re likely to thrive at Cotomo if you prefer a small, high-ownership team over a heavily structured organization; if you’re comfortable moving between models, infrastructure, and product; and if the idea of building a globally competitive AI product from Japan feels exciting to you.\nRole\nTitle: ML Tech Lead\nType: Primarily Individual Contributor\nHands-on vs. Leadership: ~70-80% hands-on / ~20-30% technical leadership\nScope: Language, speech and multimodal models, evaluation, inference, ML infrastructure, external APIs, and cost optimization\nLanguage Requirements\nJapanese: Business level or Conversational Japanese?\nEnglish: Fluent\nSeniority\n Senior level or above","description_format":"text","description_chars":5313,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Japanese","level":"All levels","optional":true},{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":true}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-05T09:03:05Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":83,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.831,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["seen:4","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":57474,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/starley-lead-aiml-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/starley-lead-aiml-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T22:20:34Z","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":12054,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"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":3900829},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3900829"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fstarley-lead-aiml-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%2Fstarley-lead-aiml-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%2Fstarley-lead-aiml-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/starley-lead-aiml-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fstarley-lead-aiml-engineer"}]}