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Forward Deployed Engineer (GTM)

Sakana AI· GTM
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Hybrid (Japan), Remotefull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Founding member of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) function within the GTM team responsible for deploying Sakana AI products into enterprise environments, driving PoCs to production, and shaping product through field feedback and code contributions.

Responsibilities

  • Own the deployment of Sakana AI’s products into enterprise environments: understand the customer’s business and systems, design the integration architecture, and implement connections to existing systems, data sources, and identity infrastructure
  • Lead PoCs and drive them to production; resolve security, compliance, and IT-review requirements together with the customer’s IT and security teams
  • Configure, tune, and extend the product for each customer’s workflows, including building surrounding tools and workflows on top of our APIs and establishing evaluation and quality-improvement loops
  • Drive adoption and prove value: discover and prioritize use cases, define success metrics with the customer, measure impact from usage data, and build internal champions through training and enablement
  • Lead expansion: plan and execute rollouts from the first use case to adjacent departments and company-wide deployment, and lead the technical side of expansion proposals in partnership with Product Sales
  • Contribute directly to the product codebase: reproduce and fix issues found in the field, and design and implement standard product features that address needs common across the market
  • Structure customer requirements, blockers, and missing capabilities into prioritized roadmap proposals, and participate in roadmap and design discussions with Product Managers and engineers
  • Build reusable assets such as integration templates, reference implementations, and deployment playbooks so that each new deployment is faster than the last

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of hands-on software engineering experience in a production environment, including API design and implementation, testing, and code review as part of a team
  • Experience leading technical scoping and decision-making directly with customers (e.g., as an FDE, solutions engineer, sales engineer, or tech lead on client-facing projects)
  • Experience deploying and integrating systems into enterprise environments, including authentication, data integration, and security-review requirements
  • Experience building or deploying applications that use LLMs and generative AI
  • Ability to define scope and drive execution independently in an environment without established playbooks
  • Native-level Japanese (customer-facing negotiation)
  • Business-level English (Preferred)
  • Experience as an FDE, solutions engineer, or customer engineer at an AI or SaaS product company (Preferred)
  • Track record of leading a customer from PoC to production, company-wide rollout, and expanded usage or contract (Preferred)
  • Experience contributing continuously to a product codebase as a member of a product engineering team (Preferred)
  • Experience building RAG, AI agents, or evaluation pipelines (Preferred)

Skills

Required:Software engineeringCustomer engagement and technical leadershipSystem integrationGenerative AI / LLMsAutonomy and initiative
Last updated Oct 25, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Sakana AI

Building Frontier AI in Japan

We are creating a new kind of foundation model based on nature-inspired intelligence.

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