Forward Deployed Engineer - Japan

Overview

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you embed directly with customer teams to own outcomes, ship production-grade SpaceXAI systems, and provide technical feedback from the field to product engineering. You own work end to end from discovery through launch, iteration, and post-launch support.

What you'll do

• Lead discovery with customers by orienting in their codebases and workflows, finding the real bottleneck and use case worth building, and defining clear success metrics.
• Design and ship production agents, AI applications, and coding-agent workflows on Grok and our models across live business processes and customer engineering organizations.
• Get a first version live in days, then harden it over weeks through rollout, monitoring, and iteration from real usage.
• Own production quality, including tracing, evals, debugging model or delivery failures, and latency and cost tradeoffs.
• Build systems around the model, including tools, MCP servers, retrieval, rules, skills, CI gates, and evals.
• Integrate systems into customer authentication, data, workflow, and delivery systems, and decide whether prompting, architecture, data, process, or a model change is the right lever.
• Measure outcomes including revenue, cost, hours saved, error rate, cycle time, and escaped defects rather than seat adoption.
• Work directly with Staff+, platform, and domain leaders, going deep in their systems while communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results.
• Leave customer teams able to run what you built and turn learnings into reusable patterns and improvements to SpaceXAI products.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, or data science.
• Ability to write and review production code in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript; other languages are welcome.
• Experience owning a customer or operator outcome, not just a slide or prototype, and turning a fuzzy problem into a scoped, shipped system.
• Experience building and owning AI-native workflows or agents in production and debugging real production failures involving models, tools, data, pipelines, or delivery paths.
• Experience handling production reliability, including metrics, alerts, safe rollouts, and incident response.
• Ability to build end to end across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and prompt iteration.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity without needing a complete specification before starting to build.
• Ability to talk to working engineers and to a VP.
• Fluency in both Japanese and English.

Nice to have

• 2+ years in a customer-facing role, leading discovery conversations and being accountable for outcomes for external stakeholders.
• Hands-on depth in several of agents and tool-calling, eval harnesses, retrieval and context systems, CI/CD or developer platforms, and AI-native coding workflows in a real repo.
• Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or platform engineer embedded with customers, or as a founding engineer who owned an AI product end to end.

Details

• Location: Japan.