Technical Project Manager / Engineering Lead – AI/ML Infrastructure
JPY 150k - JPY 200k • Tokyo Prefecture, Japan • Full-time
Posted 2d ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
SambaNova is seeking a highly technical and strategic Project Manager / Engineering Lead to own and advance our engagement with a key strategic partner. This role will serve as the central hub for all technical, operational, and strategic activities, ensuring the technical success of joint projects, managing complex deliverables, leading a cross-functional engineering team, and deepening the customer relationship. The ideal candidate will possess a unique blend of deep technical understanding of AI/ML systems, exceptional project management skills, and strong customer-facing abilities, with fluency in both Japanese and English.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end planning and execution of complex technical evaluation projects.
- Develop and maintain detailed project timelines, aligning engineering efforts with customer milestones.
- Lead daily standups and syncs to track progress, identify risks, and unblock the engineering team.
- Manage deliverables such as performance benchmarks, technical reports, and software artifacts.
- Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the customer's engineering teams.
- Manage customer expectations, communicating project status, capabilities, and limitations.
- Translate customer requirements and feedback into actionable engineering tasks.
- Prepare and deliver technical briefings and reports to customer stakeholders.
- Coordinate the work of a large, distributed team of engineers specializing in compilers, performance SDKs, model bring-up, systems, and packaging.
- Assign action items and ensure accountability across different functional groups.
- Facilitate collaboration between internal teams (Product, Engineering, GTM) for a unified strategy.
- Articulate the technical differentiators of the platform, including scale-up/scale-out performance, compilation workflows, and comparative analysis.
- Drive technical decisions on project scope, including model selection and success criteria.
- Analyze project outcomes to inform product roadmap and future sales strategies.
Requirements
- Fluent in Japanese and English.
- Experience supporting strategic Japanese and US high technical companies, managing cultural and time-zone differences.
- 10+ years of experience in technical project management, engineering lead, or customer-facing architect role within AI/ML, HPC, or systems infrastructure.
- Proven experience managing complex software/hardware integration or evaluation projects with tight deadlines.
- Strong understanding of AI/ML workloads, including model training, inference, and associated software stack (e.g., PyTorch, vLLM).
- Excellent communication skills, able to explain highly technical concepts to engineers and executives.
- Demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams without direct authority.
- Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models.
- Background in performance analysis and benchmarking of AI systems.
- Familiarity with compiler technology, parallel programming, or high-speed networking.
Benefits
- Equity
- 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance
- 77% premium coverage for dependents
- Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Short/Long term Disability insurance
- Basic Life insurance
- Voluntary Life insurance
- AD&D insurance
- Flexible Spending Account (FS)