Jobs at Zilliz (Now Hiring) — 3 open

Founding Field Engineer, Japan

Tokyo, Japan · Hybrid

Senior$113M raised

Zilliz is a leading AI data infrastructure company and the creator of Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database with 45,000+ GitHub stars. Zilliz helps enterprises and AI startups make their uns…

Skills: Database Systems, Distributed Systems, Cloud Infrastructure, Kubernetes, Site Reliability Engineering

Senior Software Engineer, Vector Index Research

Redwood City, California, United States · Hybrid

$175k–$250k/yr

Mid level$113M raised

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leading vector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popular open-source vector database, the company builds…

Skills: C++, Rust, Vector Search, ANN Algorithms, High-Performance Computing

Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Platform

Redwood City, California, United States · Hybrid

$175k–$225k/yr

Mid level$113M raised

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leading vector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popular open-source vector database, the company builds…

Skills: Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP, Azure

Founding Field Engineer, Japan

Tokyo, Japan • Hybrid

Senior

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Full-time
Posted 36d ago
~40 hrs/week

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary technical engineering counterpart for customers in Japan, managing POCs, onboarding, and production adoption. Act as a bridge between Japanese customers and internal engineering teams to translate market feedback into product improvements.

Requirements

Requires a strong technical background in database, distributed, or cloud infrastructure with experience managing production systems. Must possess native or fluent Japanese communication skills and business-level English.

Full job description

Zilliz is a leading AI data infrastructure company and the creator of Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database with 45,000+ GitHub stars. Zilliz helps enterprises and AI startups make their unstructured data searchable, analyzable, and governable — turning text, images, audio, video, and more into a strategic asset for production AI.

Zilliz's technology centers on Milvus and Zilliz Cloud. Milvus is an open-source vector database purpose-built for 100-billion-scale vector search. Zilliz Cloud extends that foundation into a fully managed Vector Lakebase platform, combining the high-throughput, low-latency serving capabilities of vector databases with the openness, scalability, and economics of multimodal data lakes. Zilliz powers more than 10,000 enterprises and AI-native startups worldwide.

\nAbout the Role

We are looking for a highly technical, customer-facing engineer to join our Japan founding team. This role sits within the Engineering organization and focuses on customer technical engagement, POCs, onboarding, production adoption, post-sales technical engagement, and bridging customer needs with internal engineering execution.

You will work closely with our Japan GTM team, including Account Executives and Solutions Architects, to help customers evaluate, adopt, and succeed with our technology. This is not a traditional sales engineering role. We are looking for someone with a strong engineering background in data infrastructure, database systems, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or site reliability engineering who is excited to work directly with customers and bring real-world customer insights back into Engineering.

What You Will Do

Serve as the engineering-side technical counterpart for customers in Japan.
Partner with Account Executives, Solutions Architects teams across technical discovery, POCs, onboarding, go-live readiness, production adoption, and post-sales technical engagement.
Work directly with customer engineering, platform, data, infrastructure, and AI teams to understand their architecture, use cases, technical requirements, and operational challenges.
Support customer POCs by helping define success criteria, validate technical requirements, troubleshoot issues, and identify the right implementation path.
Guide customers through onboarding and production adoption, including deployment planning, architecture reviews, go-live preparation, operational readiness, and best-practice guidance.
Help diagnose production issues, reproduce problems, analyze performance and reliability concerns, coordinate engineering escalations, and guide customers toward effective resolutions.
Act as a bridge between customers and internal engineering teams when customer scenarios span multiple product areas or technical domains.
Translate customer problems, product gaps, technical blockers, and market feedback into clear, actionable input for Engineering and Product teams.
Help build Japan-specific technical knowledge, reference architectures, best practices, and documentation.

Who You Are

You may be a database, distributed systems, or data infrastructure engineer who has built core infrastructure products and understands how complex systems behave in production. You may not have held a formal customer-facing role before, but you have strong business sense, curiosity about customer problems, and an interest in moving closer to customers.

Alternatively, you may be an SRE, platform engineer, infrastructure engineer, or technical lead working with data infrastructure products in production. You have hands-on experience with deployment, reliability, observability, incident response, performance tuning, troubleshooting, production adoption, and customer-facing technical escalation, and you are interested in taking a more client-facing role.

What We Are Looking For

Strong hands-on technical background in database systems, distributed systems, data infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, storage systems, search infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering.
Experience working with production systems, with a strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, troubleshooting, and operational best practices.
Ability to understand complex customer architectures and translate ambiguous technical problems into clear next steps.
Experience or strong interest in supporting customer POCs, onboarding, go-live readiness, production adoption, and post-sales technical engagement.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to both customer engineering teams and internal engineering stakeholders.
Strong business sense and the ability to connect technical problems with customer value, adoption, and product impact.
Comfort working across multiple engineering domains and coordinating with internal teams to resolve customer-facing technical issues.
Native or fluent Japanese communication skills.
Business-level English, with the ability to collaborate effectively with global engineering and product teams.

Nice to Have

Experience with database internals, query engines, storage engines, indexing, vector search, search infrastructure, or modern data infrastructure products.
Experience at a data infrastructure, database, AI infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or developer tools company.
Experience supporting enterprise customers through POCs, technical evaluation, onboarding, deployment, troubleshooting, production adoption, or escalation management.
Familiarity with AI infrastructure, machine learning systems, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, or modern data platforms.
Prior exposure to pre-sales, post-sales, customer success engineering, field engineering, or technical account management.

Why This Role Matters

Japan is a strategic market for us, and this role will be part of the local founding team while remaining deeply connected to Engineering. You will be the technical voice closest to customers in Japan, helping us understand real-world production needs, identify product gaps, and improve how our technology creates customer value.

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who enjoys solving hard technical problems, working directly with customers, and helping customers move from evaluation to production success.

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Related keywords

MilvusZilliz CloudVector DatabaseAI InfrastructureData InfrastructureKubernetesRAGEmbeddingsDistributed SystemsSREPlatform EngineeringPOCProduction AdoptionVector LakebaseMultimodal Data LakesSearch Infrastructure

About Zilliz

LinkedIn Visit site

Vector database trailblazer and creator of Milvus, the world's most widely-adopted open source vector database.

Industry: Software Development
Company size: 51-200 employees
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: Redwood City, CA
LinkedIn followers: 25,276
Total funding: $113M

Zilliz is a leading vector database company for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world's most widely-adopted open-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations create AI applications at ease. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization. Contact us here for time-limited discount and demo request for scalable enterprise AI infra: https://zilliz.com/contact-sales?utm_source-linkedin

Offices: Redwood City, CA 94065, US

databaseartificialintelligenceunstructureddatamachinlearningsimilaritysearchvectordatabaseand distributedsystemArtificial IntelligenceSoftwareSaaS

View all jobs at Zilliz

About Zilliz

LinkedIn Visit site

Vector database trailblazer and creator of Milvus, the world's most widely-adopted open source vector database.

Industry: Software Development
Company size: 51-200 employees
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: Redwood City, CA
LinkedIn followers: 25,276
Total funding: $113M

Zilliz is a leading vector database company for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world's most widely-adopted open-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations create AI applications at ease. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization. Contact us here for time-limited discount and demo request for scalable enterprise AI infra: https://zilliz.com/contact-sales?utm_source-linkedin

Offices: Redwood City, CA 94065, US

databaseartificialintelligenceunstructureddatamachinlearningsimilaritysearchvectordatabaseand distributedsystemArtificial IntelligenceSoftwareSaaS

View all jobs at Zilliz

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