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 like transformer 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.