AI Research Scientist, R4D, Mercari
Salary not provided
AI Research Scientist, R4D
- Employment Status: Full-time
- Work Hours: Full Flextime (no core time)
- Location: Roppongi, Tokyo
Organization/Team Mission
Mercari Engineering Principles:
- Passion For The Product
- Grow Together
- Solve Through Mechanisms
- Collaborate Openly
R4D is a research and development organization with the mission to bridge research, innovation, and real-world impact, focusing on advanced technologies. “R4D” stands for Research and the four D’s: Design, Development, Deployment, and Disruption.
As part of the R4D team, you will work on cutting-edge projects related to machine learning and computer vision, with emphasis on multimodal foundation models and agentic AI systems. This is a Tokyo-based role developing next-generation AI technologies for e-commerce.
Work Responsibilities
- Research and develop new technologies related to multimodal foundation models and generative AI, including computer vision and natural language processing (NLP).
- Design and execute large-scale model training and conduct performance evaluations across multiple benchmarks.
- Develop prototypes for new algorithms and present research results both internally and externally.
- Collaborate with researchers, engineers, and business teams to research and implement advanced technologies for next-generation AI services.
Unique Challenges
- Participate in research whose results are directly implemented in society.
- Collaborate with university researchers, working on long-term projects outside traditional corporate frameworks.
- Engage with state-of-the-art technology in AI, Computer Vision, and AR/VR domains to continually update your skill set.
Qualifications
Required Experience/Skills
- Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
- Practical experience in computer vision or multimodal learning within machine learning or generative models.
- Record of publications in top-tier conferences or journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS).
- Development experience with programming languages such as Python or C++.
- Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Familiarity with modern development tools and cloud environments (e.g., Git, Docker, AWS, GCP).
Preferred Experience/Skills
- 3+ years of professional experience in software or research and development.
- Experience training Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision-Language Models.
- Implementation experience in supervised learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or graph learning, including pre-training and fine-tuning.
- Experience in building large-scale datasets.
- Experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and large-scale model deployment.
- Experience designing and operating distributed learning environments or training pipelines.
- Business-level Japanese proficiency (smooth reading, writing, and listening skills).
Language
- Japanese: Independent (CEFR - B2) preferred
- English: Independent (CEFR – B2)
Learn More
- Careers site
- Mercan
- Social media: X / LinkedIn
Recruitment Process
- Application Screening
- Skill Assessment (HackerRank or GitHub for engineering positions)
- Interviews (number may vary)
- Reference Check
- Offer
More on the recruiting process
Equal Opportunity Hiring
The organization is committed to creating an environment where everyone can realize their potential, regardless of background. Discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or physical ability will not be tolerated.