Sr. 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: June 13, 2025

Location: Americas / EMEA

Hi there!

Are you excited about building the AI foundation that powers real product experiences? We’re thrilled to invite you to join the Data AI/ML team at Zapier as a Sr. Applied AI Engineer!

As a key member of our team, you’ll be at the heart of our efforts to make AI a core part of every Zapier product. You’ll help design and build the reusable building blocks—like LLM-powered APIs, vector search services, orchestration libraries, and evaluation tooling—that enable teams across the company to create AI agent experiences quickly and safely.

This is your chance to shape how AI is implemented at Zapier—from the raw data and infrastructure to the user-facing product experiences. You’ll collaborate with AI Engineers, Product teams and Machine Learning Engineers to make sure our AI capabilities are scalable, reliable, and easy to use. Your work will have massive impact across the entire organization.

If you’re passionate about large language models (LLMs), love building powerful developer tools, and want to help bring intelligent automation to millions of users, we’d love to meet you!

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 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 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 have at least 1 year of experience working with large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks in production environments. You experimented with build user facing leveraging agent architectures.

• 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 likely 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

• Build foundational AI tooling—like reusable frontend and backend components for AI agent experiences, observability mechanisms and evaluation tooling.

• You will work mostly in TypeScript. Experience isn’t strictly required, but it is a big plus. Comfort with typed languages and modern backend practices is a must.

• Design and implement data-driven feedback loops to monitor and improve the performance, reliability, and safety of agent systems at scale.

• Proactively identify tooling gaps and work across teams to standardize best practices for building, deploying, and monitoring AI-driven experiences.

• Collaborate closely with engineers across product, infra, and data teams to ensure our AI components are reusable, well-documented, and easy to adopt company-wide.

• Experiment with emerging LLMs and retrieval strategies, helping the team evaluate when to fine-tune, swap models, or adjust orchestration logic.

Difference between an Applied AI Engineer and an ML Engineer at Zapier:

How do we discern between other AI-forward engineering roles like ML Engineers and Applied AI Engineers? Both roles benefit from backend engineering skills and experience with LLMs.

• ML engineers are expected to have more experience building data pipelines as well as experience utilizing other types of ML models beyond LLMs.

• AI engineers are expected to have more full stack engineering experience, which would typically include frontend experience, and may only have experience working with LLMs.

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 prioritizes the security of our customers' information and is dedicated to adhering to all applicable data privacy laws. You can review our privacy policy here.

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 [email protected].

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 outthis resource for a list of countries where we currently cannot have Zapiens permanently working.