Staff Applied AI Engineer

Staff Applied AI Engineer at Zapier

At Zapier, we build and use automation every day to make work more efficient, creative, and human. We encourage the responsible and transparent use of AI tools in applications, providing guidance on how to collaborate with AI during Zapier’s hiring process.

About Zapier

Zapier is a platform dedicated to helping millions of businesses scale with automation and AI, driven by the mission to make automation work for everyone. As part of the team, you'll collaborate with intelligent, curious people, build cutting-edge tools, and leverage remote work flexibility to directly fuel customer success.

• Commitment to Applicants
• Culture and Values at Zapier
• Zapier Guide to Remote Work
• Zapier Code of Conduct
• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

About The Role: Staff Applied AI Engineer, AI Capabilities

Zapier is seeking a Staff Applied AI Engineer for the AI Capabilities team, a foundational engineering role responsible for building the shared AI execution platform. This platform powers every AI product at Zapier, including Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier, and future orchestration experiences.

The AI Capabilities team unifies runtimes, tooling, data models, and orchestration layers to create a reliable, high-quality, and ergonomic AI foundation. As a Staff Applied AI Engineer, you will contribute deep technical expertise in LLMs, orchestration, evaluation, runtime systems, and platform engineering. You will shape architecture, guide trade-offs, elevate engineering standards, and ensure scalability, safety, cost-efficiency, and ease of use for the platform.

This role is ideal for those passionate about solving hard AI platform problems that directly impact user-facing products, building foundations that other AI-focused teams and millions of users will rely on.

Why this is different (and exciting)

This is a unique opportunity to help build the AI platform behind one of the world’s largest automation ecosystems, empowering all runtime AI products at Zapier. You will tackle critical challenges like making AI reliable, fast, safe, cost-efficient, and easy to build on, directly enabling product teams to ship smarter features faster. Your high-leverage work will blend platform design, system architecture, and applied AI, allowing you to shape intelligent automation at scale.

About You

• Proven engineering impact: Demonstrated outcomes in complex, cloud-based systems used by real customers, potentially including enterprise deals.
• LLM expertise: At least 2 years of hands-on experience with production-grade large language models, including agent architectures, transformer networks, and attention mechanisms.
• Evaluation & retrieval systems: Direct experience deploying LLM evaluation frameworks and building Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG systems, with expertise in indexing/chunking strategies, semantic search, and vector databases.
• Builder first: Leads through hands-on contributions, unblocking adoption, modeling best practices, and shipping code, not just advising.
• Pragmatic judgment over novelty: Ability to discern signal from hype, making informed decisions on when to standardize and scale based on evaluations, user impact, cost, and latency.
• Design for scale and ambiguity: Capable of designing robust systems in complex, high-scale, fluid environments.
• Skilled communicator: Moves fluidly between pair programming, cross-functional problem-solving, and customer discovery, building trusting relationships.
• AI power user: Proactively embraces AI in the engineering toolkit, advocates for its use, and shares workflows to elevate others.

Things You’ll Do

• Lead key architectural efforts for the unified AI platform, defining orchestrator architecture, shared runtime components, and foundational APIs.
• Guide high-impact technical decisions across AI Capabilities, influencing orchestration patterns, execution flows, and data model design.
• Provide technical oversight during runtime consolidation, balancing reliability, speed, safety, and developer ergonomics.
• Partner deeply with product teams across the AI organization to support migrations, define interfaces, and translate needs into platform capabilities.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar for AI Capabilities, sharing patterns and fostering a platform engineering culture.

Work Hours & Collaboration Expectations

This global remote role requires working standard Eastern Time ET hours at least three days per week for collaboration with North America-based stakeholders. Other work hours can be flexible, provided they meet team needs and comply with local regulations. Zapier is committed to sustainable schedules.

How To Apply

Zapier utilizes a non-standard, inclusive application process focused on in-depth questions rather than just resumes. Applicants are encouraged to answer these questions to help Zapier assess fit. Education is not a requirement, but recent educational experience is needed for background checks upon offer. Zapier commits to providing application status updates within seven days and is an equal-opportunity, all-remote employer dedicated to diversity, inclusion, belonging, and equity. Reasonable accommodations for disabilities can be requested via jobs@zapier.com.

The anticipated application window is 30 days from posting, subject to change based on applicant volume or position fulfillment. Certain countries are restricted for permanent employment.

Key skills/competency

• Large Language Models LLMs
• AI Orchestration
• Platform Engineering
• Evaluation Frameworks
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG
• Vector Databases
• Semantic Search
• Agent Architectures
• Cloud-based Systems
• Distributed Systems