One studio, senior throughout.
UPAOK, founded in 2024 and based in Minato, Tokyo. Two sides to the business: engineering delivery for client teams, and expert data operations across the platforms that train frontier models.
- Established
- 2024
- Based in
- Minato, Tokyo
- Languages
- English · 日本語 · 中文
Two practices, run side by side.
Engineering delivery and data operations are staffed and measured separately, because they fail in different ways. Work often crosses between them — an evaluation suite built by one is run by the other.
Engineering delivery
Led by · Principal engineer
Full-stack product work, AI automation, content platforms and CRM systems. Whoever writes your scope sits on the delivery team, and everyone on the engagement is named in the statement of work.
- Distributed systems
- Applied AI
- Postgres
- Integrations
Data operations
Led by · Operations lead
Expert contributor pools across the AI training platforms — sourcing, calibration, rubric design, and the quality layer that decides whether work is worth paying for. It runs alongside delivery, not under it.
- Contributor screening
- Rubric design
- Inter-rater agreement
- Reconciliation
What has happened so far.
Short, because the studio is young. Dated rather than numbered, because these are events and not a sequence anyone designed.
Studio founded
Two principals leave staff engineering roles and start taking work directly. First client is a payments platform with a reconciliation problem.
First handover completed
A client team ships version two without us. This becomes the model for how every engagement ends.
AI practice formalised
After three LLM projects, we write down what actually worked: evaluation first, agents second. It becomes a standard part of scoping.
Referral partnerships open
Agencies and consultants start bringing us engineering work. We publish the revenue numbers rather than describe them.
Trilingual delivery
English, Japanese, and Chinese across scoping, documentation, and handover — not just sales conversations.
Three products in active build
Current load: a fintech ledger, a manufacturing scheduling tool, and an internal automation platform.
Company profile.
The same information a drawing carries in its corner: who made this, when, where, and under what name.
- Registered name
- UPAOK
- Trading name
- UPAOK
- Established
- 2024
- Location
- Minato, Tokyo
- Practices
- Engineering delivery · Data operations
- Working languages
- English · 日本語 · 中文
- Team
- Senior engineers, specialists as needed
- Concurrent projects
- Three maximum
- Ward
- Minato, Tokyo
How we work across timezones
We are in Tokyo and hold overlapping hours with Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North American mornings. Everything that matters is written down, so no decision waits on somebody being awake. One live hour a week, the rest async.
On languages
English, 日本語, 中文 — across scoping documents, code comments, and handover material, not only in meetings. A handover your team cannot read in its own language is not a handover.
Talk to the people who would build it.
No account manager, no discovery call that turns out to be a sales call. You will be speaking to whoever would be writing the code.