Senior Creative ML Engineer

Applications: candidates must already be in Japan. Visa sponsorship: not available. Japanese: Not required. English: Business level. Japan Dev tags: Engineering, ML, Python, Typescript, Docker.

About Us

Kamikai Labs is reimagining the future of 2D animation. Through our AI-powered suite of production tools we help studios and indie creators accelerate and elevate the animation process. Our tools are already in use by top-tier Japanese studios and emerging prosumer markets alike, and we’re expanding fast.

As we push the boundaries of what’s possible with image and video diffusion, we’re looking for an exceptional Senior Creative AI Engineer to join our Tokyo-based team.

About the Role

This is a hybrid creative-engineering position for someone who thrives at the intersection of generative AI, software engineering, and animation workflows. You’ll prototype, train, deploy, and maintain new AI tools used in production by professional animators and creators. You’ll also work closely with the founding team to shape future directions in both research and product.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, fine-tune, and deploy state-of-the-art diffusion models for image and video tasks.
• Develop ComfyUI workflows and custom nodes to power production pipelines.
• Stand up and manage Dockerized services and inference endpoints (REST, WebSocket, etc.).
• Design and maintain internal tools for training LoRAs and dataset management.
• Keep up to date with the latest in multimodal research (Hunyuan, WAN, FLUX, etc.).
• Contribute across the stack — from UI for artist-facing tools to backend APIs.
• Work with designers and animators to ensure tooling meets real-world creative needs.
• Bonus: contribute to or explore areas like 3D mesh generation, character rigging, or webtoon-to-anime workflows.

Requirements

• Strong AI engineering background with experience fine-tuning diffusion or transformer-based models.
• Experience with ComfyUI, including building custom workflows and components.
• Fluent in Docker — able to create, modify, and deploy containerized inference environments.
• Experience deploying and monitoring production inference endpoints.
• Comfortable operating across fast-moving creative and technical domains.
• English fluency is required. Japanese conversational fluency is a bonus.

Bonus Qualifications

• Past work with foundation models or training models from scratch on large datasets.
• Experience in 3D (e.g. mesh generation, rigging, Blender pipelines).
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or generative art communities.
• Familiarity with anime production workflows, webtoons, or storytelling pipelines.
• Strong design sense and ability to independently create compelling visuals or demo content.
• Proficient full-stack skills, with ability to build usable tools quickly in Python, TypeScript, or similar.

Why Join Kamikai?

• Build tools that redefine the animation industry
• Work directly with top Japanese and global studios
• Collaborate with a team of AI veterans, artists, and hackers
• Freedom to explore weird and ambitious creative ideas
• Competitive compensation + equity