AI Engineer (Voice)

We're looking for an AI Engineer to own HiKana's real-time voice conversation stack—speech recognition, TTS, LLM dialogue, and latency. HiKana is an iOS and Android app where English speakers practice Japanese by talking with Kana, an original AI anime character.

You'll work closely with our technical co-founder in a small Tokyo team, shipping improvements that learners feel immediately in every conversation.

Responsibilities

• Design and improve real-time voice AI: ASR, TTS, turn-taking, barge-in, and end-to-end latency
• Integrate and tune LLMs for spoken Japanese learning dialogue
• Own reliability and quality metrics for live voice sessions on iOS and Android
• Ship iteratively in a small, high-ownership team

Requirements

• Strong English (required). Japanese is not required for day-to-day work
• Genuine motivation to learn Japanese (required)—our product and users are built around that journey
• Hands-on experience with real-time voice or conversational AI
• Comfortable shipping production systems, not only prototypes
• Based in or willing to work from Tokyo (Shibuya)

Nice to have

• Japanese ASR/TTS or multilingual voice models
• Mobile or realtime audio (WebRTC) experience
• Interest in language learning or anime/IP consumer apps

Work style: This role is office-based at our Tokyo office (hybrid; full remote is not possible). Applicants must already live in Japan and hold a valid right to work in Japan, as we do not offer visa sponsorship for this position.