Zapier

Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Zapier

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🏈 Anywhere in North America

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Salary

💰 $274,800 - $412,200 per year

Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

Cloud

About the role

  • Make Zapier Agents the #1 way to get real work done with AI: deliver features, spot differentiation, advise on product strategy, and up-level teams and customers
  • Shape AI & Agents strategy: scout high-leverage opportunities, filter hype, define planning and tool integration UX, and set explore-vs-harden guardrails
  • Drive technical oversight: provide oversight for agent initiatives ensuring security, privacy, reliability, and scalability while keeping velocity high
  • Advance agent architecture and developer experience; collaborate with Principal Engineers on company-level direction
  • Build data-driven systems: design feedback loops and evaluation suites to capture real usage and improve grounding, tool-use success, prompting strategies, and model choice
  • Integrate and innovate pragmatically: explore emerging agent capabilities, make go/no-go decisions, and convert successful experiments into durable product and platform wins
  • Collaborate and teach: mentor engineers, codify practical agent patterns, and help teams and customers understand where Agents fits in their AI transformation

Requirements

  • Proven engineering impact in complex, cloud-based systems used by real customers
  • Many strong candidates for Staff+ roles have 10+ years’ experience (guideline)
  • At least 2 years (or equivalent depth) of hands-on work with large language models in production, including agent architectures
  • Familiarity with transformer networks and attention mechanisms
  • Experience deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs (performance, reliability, bias)
  • Experience building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, indexing/chunking strategies, semantic search, and vector databases
  • Hands-on builder: lead through contribution, pairing with product teams, unblocking adoption, and shipping
  • Pragmatic judgment: decide production readiness and balance cost/latency tradeoffs
  • Ability to design systems for scale and ambiguity
  • Strong communication skills for cross-functional collaboration and customer discovery
  • AI power user: proactively embrace AI and advocate workflows
  • Authorized to work from your home location; Zapier does not sponsor visas or transfers