Applied AI Engineer

About Zapier

We're humans who simply think computers should do more work.

At Zapier, we’re not just making software—we’re building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale with automation and AI. Our mission is to make automation work for everyone by delivering products that delight our customers. You’ll collaborate with brilliant people, use the latest tools, and leverage the flexibility of remote work. Your work will directly fuel our customers’ success, and as they grow, so will you.

Job Posted: December 9, 2024

Location: Americas (North, Central and South America)

Hi there!

We're looking for an AI Engineer to join Zapier’s Editor:AI Team and help us move closer to our mission of making automation accessible to everyone. At Zapier, we envision a future where everyone has their own personal automation assistant, powered by the perfect blend of AI and our robust automation systems. The Editor:AI team is a core part of this mission, working to reduce the friction in creating and updating automations know as Zaps through the power of AI powered agents.

As an AI Engineer on our team, you’ll play a crucial role in helping design, develop, and maintaining AI-powered systems that can help drastically improve user experience. You’ll be responsible for integrating AI models into existing software, troubleshooting, and ensuring these systems run smoothly. Communication is key—whether you’re collaborating with fellow engineers or explaining complex AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders, your ability to bridge that gap will be vital.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and the evolving landscape of AI tooling, we believe a new kind of engineering is emerging—one that blends the best of classical ML research with backend engineering. We’re looking for someone who not only has deep experience working with LLMs but also understands how to harness these tools to create new, valuable product experiences. This role sits at the intersection of traditional skill sets, requiring both the expertise of ML research and the practical know-how of backend engineering, along with proficiency in the latest AI technologies.

If you’re interested in advancing your career at a fast-growing, profitable, impact-driven company, then read on…

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

Even though our job description may seem like we're looking for a specific candidate, the role inevitably ends up tailored to the person who applies and joins. Regardless of how well you feel you fit our description, we encourage you to apply if you meet these criteria:

About You

• You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 of those years dedicated to building distributed, scalable cloud based web applications. You possess strong communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and a drive to deliver outstanding customer experiences for both external users and internal stakeholders.

• You’re familiar with underlying technologies like transformer networks, attention mechanisms, and how they contribute to models’ abilities to generate coherent responses, generate function calls, and perform other language tasks.

• You have at least 1 year of experience working with large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks in production environments. You likely have some experience in advanced prompt techniques for LLM grounding, such as chain-of-thought, static few-shot examples, and/or dynamic few-shot examples. You may also have experience fine-tuning LLMs to meet specific needs, focusing on training data optimization and bias mitigation.

• You have deployed evaluation frameworks for LLMs, with an understanding on performance, reliability, and bias assessment.

• You likely have experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and understand how to optimize knowledge retrieval for improved model accuracy and speed. You likely have experience with different indexing and chunking strategies based on the system’s data and goals, as well as semantic search and vector databases, and how they differ from traditional retrieval methods and databases.

• You have experience of working through the full lifecycle of building, testing, deploying, and scaling LLM architectures.

• You can identify and document trade-offs made during the development process. You also have experience building with cloud infrastructure technologies.

• You love shipping to customers. You’ll be on a team focused on understanding customers' needs and translating those needs from specifications into functional, production-ready code. You know how to balance speed versus quality to support the features we build for our

• You embody our values. At Zapier, our values are at the heart of how we work together and how we think about our customers. In our remote setting, they help develop trust and ensure we work and collaborate to democratize automation.

Things You’ll Do

• You understand that AI-based applications thrive on data-driven feedback loops, which will be central to any system you develop. These loops will capture and instrument user data, synthesize core use cases, and implement/test strategies with LLMs to enhance performance.

• You will be responsible for integrating LLMs into software products at Zapier, which will include setting up the necessary infrastructure to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability.

• You will explore new and divergent LLM systems that can create measurable improvements over our current implementations.

• You will design and implement prompting strategies for LLMs to help users create new automations, making the process more intuitive and efficient.

• You will design and develop comprehensive evaluation suites to assess model performance and reliability.

• You will monitor the performance and health of AI systems, proactively detecting and addressing issues such as system failures and performance degradation.

• You will collaborate with Data and cross-functional teams to refine and deploy LLM-based features.

How to Apply

At Zapier, we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better, which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We're looking for the best fit for each of our roles, regardless of the type of companies in your background, so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences don’t exactly match the job description. All we ask is that you answer a few in-depth questions in our application that would typically be asked at the start of an interview process. This helps speed things up by letting us get to know you and your skillset a bit better right out of the gate. Please be sure to answer each question; the resume and CV fields are optional.

Education is not a requirement for our roles; however, if you receive an offer, you will need to include your most recent educational experience as part of our background check process.

After you apply, you are going to hear back from us—even if we don’t see an immediate fit with our team. In fact, throughout the process, we strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. We know we’ll make mistakes from time to time, so if you ever have questions about where you stand or about the process, just ask your recruiter!

Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and we're excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someone's identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws.

Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment, Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact jobs@zapier.com. 

Application Deadline:

The anticipated application window is 30 days from the date job is posted, unless the number of applicants requires it to close sooner or later, or if the position is filled.

Even though we’re an all-remote company, we still need to be thoughtful about where we have Zapiens working. Check out this resource for a list of countries where we currently cannot have Zapiens permanently working.