Sr. Engineer, Applied AI

Job Posted: 6/6/24

Location: Americas - North, Central and South America and Europe

Hi there!

As Zapier continues to scale our mission to democratize automation, we’re hiring a Senior Applied AI Engineer for our ZapAI team. At Zapier, we have a goal to eventually provide everyone with their own personal automation assistant. We believe that the future is only possible by pairing AI with our existing robust automation systems.

Applied AI Engineering (‘AIE’) is focused on designing, developing, and maintaining AI-powered systems and applications for specific domains and use cases. They are responsible for applying AI models to solve real-world problems. Applied AI Engineers will also be responsible for integrating AI systems with existing software, as well as troubleshooting and maintaining these systems. Finally, a successful candidate will have a strong understanding of the industry or domain they are working in, as well as the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

With the rise of LLMs and associated AI tooling, we believe a new class of engineering is emerging that pulls from both classical ML Research and Backend Engineering. An Applied AI Engineer has deep experience and understanding in how to work with LLMs to create new value and experiences while pulling on skills found in both ML Research and Backend Engineering. The focus of this role is on the intersection between these traditional skill sets, but also requires proficiency in many of the new tooling and concepts particular to LLMs and modern AI tooling.

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

We know applying for and taking on a new job at any company requires a leap of faith. We want you to feel comfortable and excited to apply at Zapier. To help share a bit more about life at Zapier, here are a few resources in addition to the job description that can give you an inside look at what life is like at Zapier. Hopefully, you'll take the leap of faith and apply.

• Our Commitment to Applicants

• Culture and Values at Zapier

• Zapier Guide to Remote Work

• Zapier Code of Conduct

• Diversity and Inclusivity at Zapier

Zapier is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

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. You've dedicated at least 5 of those years to building distributed, scalable web applications. You have strong communication skills, problem-solving abilities and are driven to deliver outstanding customer experiences for both our external users and internal stakeholders.

Required Technical Skills/Experience:

1. Familiarity with the underlying technologies liketransformer networks, attention mechanisms, and how they contribute to the models’ abilities to generate coherent responses, generate function calls, and perform other language tasks.

2. You have worked with LLMs to perform complicated tasks in production environments. You’re familiar with advanced prompt techniques for LLM grounding such as chain-of-thought, static few-shot examples, and dynamic few-shot.

3. You’re proficient in deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs, focusing on performance, reliability, and bias assessment.

4. Familiarity, or experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (‘RAG’) systems and how to optimize knowledge retrieval for improved model accuracy and speed. Understanding of different indexing/chunking strategies based on the data and goal of the system. Understanding of semantic search and vector databases, and how they differ from classic retrieval methods and databases.

5. You have a track record of working through the full lifecycle of building, testing, deploying, and scaling LLM architectures.

6. Experience in fine-tuning LLMs to specific needs, with a focus on training data optimization and bias mitigation.

7. Experience coding and shipping products while working with cross-functional teams.

8. Expert at identifying and documenting trade-offs made during the development process.

9. Strong experience building with cloud infrastructure technologies.

10. Preferred, but not required, to have experience with LLM-assisted code generation.

Things You’ll Be Doing

1. You recognize that AI-based applications can only improve with data-driven feedback loops, which will be core to any system you develop. These loops capture/instrument user data, synthesize the user's core use cases, and then implement/test strategies with the LLM to improve performance.

2. Integrating LLMs into software products at Zapier, setting up necessary infrastructure ensuring its performance, scalability, and reliability.

3. Exploring new and divergent LLM systems that will create a measurable impact in improvement over our base implementations.

4. Design and implement prompting for LLMs that help our users create new automations, making the process more intuitive and efficient.

5. Design and develop comprehensive evaluation suites to assess model performance and reliability

6. Monitor the performance and health of AI systems, detecting and addressing issues, such as system failures and performance degradation.

7. Dependent on experience, implementing LLM-assisted retrieval algorithms to provide answers over large datasets.

8. Collaborate with Data and with cross-functional teams to refine and deploy LLM-based features.

You value collaboration. You understand that building modern software is a team sport, and you enjoy working as part of a tight-knit team. You’re happy to pitch in and help the team, whether by reviewing code, pairing on a tricky problem, or just thinking about how to solve the challenges we’re facing.

You value exploration and versatility. You are comfortable working in other teams’ codebases to achieve the Edge team’s goals. This will involve embedding yourself in the other team, becoming familiar with their developer workflow, and collaborating with stakeholders on the other team to implement your solutions.

You can balance lots of concerns. Our team manages a wide variety of services catering to a broad spectrum of internal clients. You'll be expected to adeptly balance incoming work to address these services, prioritizing them ruthlessly yet judiciously. Your ability to manage this diversity without being overwhelmed is crucial, ensuring not only that we meet our varied demands but also consistently deliver high-quality, impactful results in our dynamic, fast-paced environment.

You advocate for the user. You have a keen eye for great design, and you’re empathetic to the needs of the end-user. When you see users struggling to succeed you take it as a personal challenge to understand why and help the team build a better product.

You love learning new things. You love researching new tech and driving forward with the implementation details.

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 education or 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.

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 [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.