Applied AI Engineer - Tokyo

About this role

ABOUT THE TEAM

OpenAI’s Applied AI Engineering team helps organizations turn frontier AI capabilities into safe, reliable, and high-impact production systems. We work with customer executives, product and engineering teams, security leaders, and transformation teams to identify valuable opportunities, accelerate technical implementation, and scale what works. Enterprise deployments are defined by complexity rather than any one industry: existing architectures, diverse data environments, security and governance requirements, multiple stakeholder groups, and organization-wide change. We turn lessons from these deployments into better products and reusable patterns for customers everywhere.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As an Applied AI Engineer you will partner directly with leading organizations to design, build, and deploy AI systems that deliver measurable business outcomes. You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from use-case selection and architecture through prototyping, evaluation, production launch, and scale. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful customer impact—not simply activity or successful demonstrations. This is a rare opportunity to work on consequential real-world deployments at the frontier of AI while directly influencing how OpenAI’s products evolve.

This role is based in Tokyo, Japan. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Partner directly with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities and translate them into technical architectures, implementation plans, evaluation strategies, and measurable success criteria.