Founding Field Engineer, Japan

Zilliz is a leading AI data infrastructure company and the creator of Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database with 45,000+ GitHub stars. Zilliz helps enterprises and AI startups make their unstructured data searchable, analyzable, and governable - turning text, images, audio, video, and more into a strategic asset for production AI.

Zilliz's technology centers on Milvus and Zilliz Cloud. Milvus is an open-source vector database purpose-built for 100-billion-scale vector search. Zilliz Cloud extends that foundation into a fully managed Vector Lakebase platform, combining the high-throughput, low-latency serving capabilities of vector databases with the openness, scalability, and economics of multimodal data lakes. Zilliz powers more than 10,000 enterprises and AI-native startups worldwide.

About the Role

We are looking for a highly technical, customer-facing engineer to join our Japan founding team. This role sits within the Engineering organization and focuses on customer technical engagement, POCs, onboarding, production adoption, post-sales technical engagement, and bridging customer needs with internal engineering execution.

You will work closely with our Japan GTM team, including Account Executives and Solutions Architects, to help customers evaluate, adopt, and succeed with our technology. This is not a traditional sales engineering role. We are looking for someone with a strong engineering background in data infrastructure, database systems, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or site reliability engineering who is excited to work directly with customers and bring real-world customer insights back into Engineering.

What You Will Do

• Serve as the engineering-side technical counterpart for customers in Japan.
• Partner with Account Executives, Solutions Architects teams across technical discovery, POCs, onboarding, go-live readiness, production adoption, and post-sales technical engagement.
• Work directly with customer engineering, platform, data, infrastructure, and AI teams to understand their architecture, use cases, technical requirements, and operational challenges.
• Support customer POCs by helping define success criteria, validate technical requirements, troubleshoot issues, and identify the right implementation path.
• Guide customers through onboarding and production adoption, including deployment planning, architecture reviews, go-live preparation, operational readiness, and best-practice guidance.
• Help diagnose production issues, reproduce problems, analyze performance and reliability concerns, coordinate engineering escalations, and guide customers toward effective resolutions.
• Act as a bridge between customers and internal engineering teams when customer scenarios span multiple product areas or technical domains.
• Translate customer problems, product gaps, technical blockers, and market feedback into clear, actionable input for Engineering and Product teams.
• Help build Japan-specific technical knowledge, reference architectures, best practices, and documentation.

Who You Are

You may be a database, distributed systems, or data infrastructure engineer who has built core infrastructure products and understands how complex systems behave in production. You may not have held a formal customer-facing role before, but you have strong business sense, curiosity about customer problems, and an interest in moving closer to customers.

Alternatively, you may be an SRE, platform engineer, infrastructure engineer, or technical lead working with data infrastructure products in production. You have hands-on experience with deployment, reliability, observability, incident response, performance tuning, troubleshooting, production adoption, and customer-facing technical escalation, and you are interested in taking a more client-facing role.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong hands-on technical background in database systems, distributed systems, data infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, storage systems, search infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering.
• Experience working with production systems, with a strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, troubleshooting, and operational best practices.
• Ability to understand complex customer architectures and translate ambiguous technical problems into clear next steps.
• Experience or strong interest in supporting customer POCs, onboarding, go-live readiness, production adoption, and post-sales technical engagement.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to both customer engineering teams and internal engineering stakeholders.
• Strong business sense and the ability to connect technical problems with customer value, adoption, and product impact.
• Comfort working across multiple engineering domains and coordinating with internal teams to resolve customer-facing technical issues.
• Native or fluent Japanese communication skills.
• Business-level English, with the ability to collaborate effectively with global engineering and product teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with database internals, query engines, storage engines, indexing, vector search, search infrastructure, or modern data infrastructure products.
• Experience at a data infrastructure, database, AI infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or developer tools company.
• Experience supporting enterprise customers through POCs, technical evaluation, onboarding, deployment, troubleshooting, production adoption, or escalation management.
• Familiarity with AI infrastructure, machine learning systems, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, or modern data platforms.
• Prior exposure to pre-sales, post-sales, customer success engineering, field engineering, or technical account management.

Why This Role Matters

Japan is a strategic market for us, and this role will be part of the local founding team while remaining deeply connected to Engineering. You will be the technical voice closest to customers in Japan, helping us understand real-world production needs, identify product gaps, and improve how our technology creates customer value.

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who enjoys solving hard technical problems, working directly with customers, and helping customers move from evaluation to production success.