AI Engineer | Generative AI Area

【 About the company 】

Development of BX (Brand Experience) platform "BOTCHAN" and provision media business

【What is "BOTCHAN"】
This is a marketing SaaS product that uses conversational chat forms to maximize LTV.
Its strengths include the ability to complete payment within the chat form and the ability to provide comprehensive marketing support for each funnel of recognition, purchase, inquiry, and retention. Currently, mainly four of the company's products have been introduced to customers in various industries, including e-commerce, and the total number of customers has exceeded 500.

【 Job Description】

■Recruitment Background
The company's products have been implemented by a cumulative total of more than 600 companies, mainly in the D2C industry.
One of the key factors to improve brand experience is to enrich communication between users and companies. To this end, the company is accelerating its hiring of AI personnel in order to develop conversational commerce utilizing Generative AI, which has become a hot topic in recent years.

■Mission
Aiming to speed up the development of additional functions and improve the user experience by expanding resources for back-end development.

■The company's Issues
Although D2C is now readily available to everyone, many companies are still facing difficulties in connecting consumers who visit their sites to purchase products or register as members. (*D2C stands for "Direct to Consumer," meaning that the manufacturer deals directly with the consumer.)
This is because it is difficult for store clerks to support purchasing behavior through conversation with consumers online as they do offline, and e-commerce sites only provide text and video product information. It is not as exciting as offline, and it tends to be difficult to improve the brand experience.

■Vision
The company aims to make a strong contribution to corporate sales through exciting consumer experiences, or brand experiences.
Until now, marketing activities have been a one-way street, with companies sending advertisements to consumers and consumers themselves going to company websites to search for the products they want.
By incorporating chatbots as an interface, two-way communication is created in marketing activities.
We would like to provide an experience that is possible only through interactive communication, and only through online communication, which can be done at any place, at any time, and on any scale.

【Generative AI will enable us to...】
Conversational Commerce: Allows the user to conduct the buying experience more freely, as if chatting with a store clerk.
Improved searchability: Go beyond traditional searches, such as adding requests (what you want to know). It reduces the stress of the buying experience.
Improved operations: It can highly improve operations not only on the consumer side but also on the company side.

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■Responsibilities
Development of conversational commerce using Generative AI
You will be in charge of research and promotion of R&D execution for large-scale language models, including AI integration and GPT in in-house products.

Research and implementation of large-scale language models
Validation experiments of large-scale language models against business hypotheses
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■Development Environment
Cloud: Azure
AI/Data Analysis: Python, TensorFlow, Keras, Azure, etc (not so fixed)
Source control: Git, GitHub
Project management: Notion, GitHub
Communication tools: Slack, Discord

【Features of the Development Team】
One of the features of the company is that its engineering organization actively adopts new technologies and is constantly taking on technological challenges.
Adoption of new technologies and libraries can be done at the initiative of the proposer with the value provided to the user as the first priority.
In 2021, the company was the first in the world to release a new feature that enables the automatic generation of chatbots by AI, ahead of its competitors

【Development Flow】
Projects are planned based on requests from the business side and other development teams. Basically, they adopt Scrum development, but when clear milestones need to be delineated, waterfall-like elements are incorporated as appropriate. Engineers and directors communicate with each stakeholder to promote the project.

■About the Engineering Organization
- Currently, there are about 55 engineers in the company.
- Although the ratio of offshore engineers in Vietnam is still high, the company is actively recruiting engineers in order to increase the number of areas of in-house production.

Japan team (including Tokyo headquarters, Okinawa, Osaka, and regional remote offices): approx. 25
Vietnam offshore team: Approx. 30

■Evaluation System
Evaluations are conducted once a half year (March/September), and salaries are revised accordingly.
In the past, 20%~30% of all engineers have received a raise at the time of evaluation.

■Working Style of Engineers
The basic working style is a flexible work schedule with core hours (11:30~15:30).
Most engineers start work around 9:00~10:00.
- Average overtime for engineers is about 20 hours per month.
those who do not work overtime at all.
i.g. Those who work almost no overtime in order to focus on their private life
　　Those who work overtime to focus on their own growth and career.
- There are many engineers who are raising children, and they are flexible to leave work in the middle of the day or finish work early to pick up their children.
Work is evaluated based on output, not working hours.
- The company system allows full remote work, so there are many engineers who work full remotely from rural areas.
- The company system also allows [side jobs], and about 20% of engineers have a side job.

■Team Culture
Members mostly work flexibly, including local work and full remote work.
Mainly chat communication via Slack
Daily consultations are resolved as needed using Huddle
Foreign members also belong to the team and actively communicate in English.
Proactive in introducing cutting-edge technology, while considering the introduction of technology as a means rather than an end

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【 Working conditions 】

- 5,000 yen/month remote work allowance
- Up to ¥10,000/month allowance for book purchases
- Remote work environment enhanced by remote HQ
Reference https://magazine.hq-hq.co.jp/n/n317017616409
- Various qualification allowances for engineering-related qualifications
- GitHub Copilot For Business , GitHub Copilot X for full-time engineers
- OpenAI paid account (application required)

Communication allowance (5,000 yen per month)
Commuting allowance: commuting expenses paid (up to 30,000 yen)
Housing allowance: Rent subsidy system (conditions vary depending on years of employment)
*Rent subsidy...20,000 yen (within 3km radius) for those who have worked for less than 3 years, 30,000 yen (no distance specified) for those who have worked for more than 3 years
Social insurance: fully provided
Paid holidays are encouraged (e.g., anniversaries, GW, etc.)
In-house massage (once a month, company pays the cost)
Celebration and condolence expenses (congratulatory and sympathy money)
Maternity and paternity leave
Lunch subsidy
Lending of PCs
Second job: Permitted (subject to company regulations)

【Holidays】
Saturday/Sunday/National Holiday
Annual Paid Leave
New Year Holiday
Parental Leave
Congratulations & Condolence Leave

■Required *Meet all of the following
・Python : 4+ years of experience
・Experience in using natural language processing : 3 years or more
*Language skills equivalent to JLPT N1 level

■Preferred
・Master's degree or equivalent experience in the following areas.
　*Natural language processing, machine learning, research, statistics, mathematics, etc.
・Experience in business applications using NLP and large-scale language models
・Experience in prompt tuning using large-scale language models
・Certain knowledge in the above