Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Japan

At Yohana, we’re finding new ways for technology and design to lighten our loads, reclaim our time, and improve our well-being. We want it all. A career and home. Family and friends. Health and wellness. But actually having it all can leave us feeling overloaded. And research shows it. 43% of people struggle with decision-making. 66% say overload affects their work, and 62%, their interpersonal relationships.  

Technology was supposed to help by making us more efficient. But the faster we get things done, the more we take on, and our well-being falls to the bottom of the list. Yohana is on a mission to make balance a priority – and do it joyfully.

 It’s a meaningful product challenge: helping society reclaim time and make space for joy through technology and design. That’s what the team at Yohana is solving for every day, and we have a lot of fun doing it. With leadership from big tech like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and hypergrowth startups like Nest, Waymo, TaskRabbit, and Casper, we’re motivated to make the world a happier place. Join us!

Yohana is a wholly owned subsidiary of Panasonic Inc. Our unique positioning as a start-up within a global Consumer Electronics and Services company makes this opportunity one that is rich with world-class capability and game-changing possibilities. 

About The Role:

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer you will work as part of Artificial Intelligence and Data (AID) to ensure that Yohana members in Japan are benefiting from ML as much as in the USA. Similarly Yohana employees in Japan should have on pair automation and AI assistance capabilities in their day to day work. To achieve this, the help of the AID team is crucial, especially the first Japanese speaking ML Engineer. We expect iterative results utilizing existing stack over extensive research.  

What You’ll Get To Do: 

• Ensure AI/ML features parity for Japanese, adjust existing for English and add new ones
• Cooperate with colleagues from USA and Europe on top of team in Japan
• Own deliverables e2e - from gathering requirements to solution delivery and maintenance
• Develop and deploy dockerized services in python to solve real life business problems
• Gather data, build pipelines, train models, ensure reproducibility, deploy in production
• Handle entire data lifecycle management - understand, gather, clean, version, share 

What You’ll Bring:

Required Skills 

• BA/BS degree in STEM or equivalent
• 5+ years of experience in machine learning / data science / software engineering
• Native or bilingual proficiency in Japanese
• Professional proficiency in English
• Expert Python software engineering skills
• Hands on experience with natural language processing and machine learning (both supervised & unsupervised)
• Data engineering, scrubbing, analysis and visualization skills

Preferred Skills 

• Working knowledge of selected ML libraries: SpaCy, Pandas, NumPy, XGBoost. HuggingFace, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Streamlit, Dash, Gradio, Re2
• Experience in one or more of the following areas: information retrieval, recommendation engines, semantic search, text analysis, document classification, entity extraction, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, question answering, knowledge bases / graphs
• Ability to deliver value by deploying iteratively improved algorithms and fine tuned / pre-trained ML models
• Experience with MLOps (model serving, data pipelines: KFServing, DVC, MLFlow, Airflow)
• Good knowledge of relational databases and SQL
• Experience with gRPC, Docker
• Familiarity with R
• Web crawling skills (beautiful soup, selenium)
• Knowledge of Unix operating system fundamentals (macOS)
• Ability to communicate ideas and outcomes in a clear and precise manner to stakeholders
• Possibility to travel internationally 

What We Offer: 

The future of work at Yohana is flexibility. Like many other leading Silicon Valley based businesses, we follow a hybrid workplace model post-pandemic. We believe this model is consistent with our goals of fostering a highly collaborative culture, promoting employee well-being, and developing a workplace that is engaging, equitable, and innovative. 

Local (Bay Area) employees are expected to come into the office on Mondays & Wednesdays and optional on the other days of the week. Fully remote (Work From Home) employment may be available for select positions. 

Employee benefits include: 

• Opportunity to join a hyper-growth startup on a mission to make well-being attainable for modern families 
• Competitive compensation 
• Comprehensive benefits (Medical, Dental, Vision, HSA, FSA) 
• 401(k) with employer match 
• Life & Short Term Disability Insurance 
• Supplemental Medical Coverage 
• Unlimited PTO 
• 12 Company Holidays 
• Paid Maternity & Parental Leave 
• Paid Caregiver Leave 
• Employee Assistance Program 
• Group and 1-on-1 Career Coaching 
• Pet Insurance 
• Casual Dress Code 
• Catered Lunch & Snacks 
• Discounts on Panasonic products 
• Company Social Events  

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by law or company policy. All qualified individuals are required to perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation. Pre-employment drug testing is required for safety sensitive positions or as may otherwise be required by contract or law. All candidates must have valid authorization to work in the U.S. Thank you for your interest.