About Sakana AI
Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research lab founded by former Google Brain researchers, pioneering nature-inspired approaches to artificial intelligence.
About the Role
As Principal Platform Engineer, you will be the technical leader and architect of Sakana AI's infrastructure platform. You'll set the long-term technical vision for how the company builds, trains, and deploys AI systems at scale — making critical decisions about architecture, tooling, and operational practices.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical architecture and long-term roadmap for Sakana AI's platform
- Lead design reviews and make critical architectural decisions across the infrastructure stack
- Mentor platform engineers and raise the technical bar across the organization
- Drive adoption of best practices for reliability, performance, and security
- Evaluate and select core technologies, frameworks, and vendor partnerships
- Collaborate with research and product leadership to align platform capabilities with company goals
- Optimize infrastructure costs while maintaining performance and reliability targets
Qualifications
- 10+ years of infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with 3+ years in a senior/staff+ role
- Deep expertise in cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and large-scale distributed systems
- Experience building and operating ML/AI infrastructure (training clusters, model serving)
- Track record of making high-impact architectural decisions and driving technical strategy
- Strong leadership and communication skills; ability to influence without authority
- English proficiency required; Japanese language skills are a plus