Staff Engineer, Applied AI
Zapier
Zapier is hiring a Staff Applied AI Engineer for the AI Capabilities team to build and maintain the shared AI execution platform that powers all AI products (Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier) and future orchestration experiences. This foundational, high-impact role shapes unified runtimes, tooling, data models, and orchestration layers to be scalable, safe, and cost-efficient, enabling millions of users to automate more effectively. The role emphasizes remote-friendly, collaborative engineering at scale.
Qualification
- Deep technical expertise in large language models (LLMs), orchestration, evaluation, runtime systems, and platform engineering.
- Proven track record delivering scalable, enterprise-grade AI platforms powering multiple products.
- Strong architectural leadership with ability to shape unified platform architecture and make tough tradeoffs.
- Experience building high-availability, cost-efficient runtime platforms and operating at scale.
- Experience with distributed systems, data models, APIs, and cross-team integration.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills; ability to work effectively with product, data, and security stakeholders.
- Familiarity with governance, safety, privacy considerations for AI systems and compliance requirements.
- Ability to operate effectively in a remote, distributed team environment.
Responsibility
- Lead the design and evolution of Zapier's unified AI execution platform, including runtimes, tooling, data models, and orchestration layers that power all AI products.
- Define and drive architectural tradeoffs to ensure the platform is scalable, reliable, safe, and cost-efficient.
- Collaborate with multiple product teams to enable rapid delivery of AI capabilities (Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier) and future orchestration experiences.
- Build and maintain core platform components and runtimes used by other engineers and AI teams.
- Establish engineering standards, testing, monitoring, security, and governance practices for the AI platform.
- Mentor and grow a high-performing applied AI engineering team and foster cross-team collaboration.
- Evaluate new AI technologies and develop rigorous evaluation pipelines for LLMs and other AI workloads.
- Champion responsible AI usage, safety controls, and cost optimization across runtimes.
- Own cross-functional programs with product, data, security, and operations stakeholders to deliver scalable, robust solutions.
