Senior Applied Scientist

About the team

The Zillow Group’s Search & Conversational AI team helps millions of people search and find the home of their dreams. This team uses AI to help customers express their search queries in natural language and easily navigate to the results to find homes of their dreams. This team drives innovation by providing an engaging, personalized search experience to our customers using ML models and data updated in near real-time. This is a lean, customer-focused team comprising scientists and engineers, working together to deliver a delightful customer experience. We strongly believe in accountability, collaboration, and transparency. The team is now building scalable solutions for a state-of-the-art context-aware conversational AI system to help customers navigate complex real estate journeys.

Recently, this team launched Natural Language Search, a first in the real estate industry to transform the way users search for their home. This goes beyond standard filter-based search to enable users to search using queries like “waterfront homes in Seattle”. The team is in the process of launching the first consumer facing conversational assistant for consumers of Zillow.

About the role

Zillow is looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to join the Search & Conversational AI team. This is a high-impact position that shapes the future of search in the real-estate domain by influencing multiple Zillow Group brands, including Zillow, Trulia and StreetEasy. They will be hands-on in prototyping ideas, conducting analyses, and evaluating and deploying models to Zillow's highly scalable infrastructure platforms. 

Zillow is creating a new consumer-facing, context-aware conversational experience (Zillow Assistant) that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to help consumers navigate complex real estate journeys. They will lead the development and research of this new initiative.

As an Applied Scientist in the Search team, you will: 

• Building new conversational experiences using retrieval augment generation (RAG) over LLMs and other state of the art techniques.

• Create an immersive user experience by utilizing language models to comprehend and guide customer queries

• Leverage customer data to construct ranking models that deliver a personalized search & conversational experience

• Use vector embeddings search and information retrieval techniques to find relevant data

• Scale our systems to handle 1 billion searches per day and be highly performant

• Manage cost vs performance tradeoffs and make the systems operationally efficient

• Mentor other scientists and engineers to architect using the right models and tools

• Share your knowledge and effectively communicate your ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Be the focal point for science projects, coordinating deliverables, writing papers, modeling, authoring designs, and creating science plans

• Keep up with the latest advancements in the LLM, Conversational AI systems space, iterate, experiment, and bring the right toolkit 

This role has been categorized as a Remote position. “Remote” employees do not have a permanent corporate office workplace and, instead, work from a physical location of their choice which must be identified to the Company. Employees may live in any of the 50 US States, with limited exceptions. In certain cases, an employee in a remote-designated job may need to live in a specific region or time zone to support customers or clients as part of their role.

In California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York and Washington the standard base pay range for this role is $156,300.00 - $249,700.00 Annually. This base pay range is specific to California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York and Washington and may not be applicable to other locations.

In addition to a competitive base salary this position is also eligible for equity awards based on factors such as experience, performance and location. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location.

Who you are

As an Applied Scientist, you are a roll-up-the-sleeves and get-it-done researcher in machine learning with an understanding of computer vision fundamentals. This is a new space, and we are looking for someone who has:

• A Ph.D. or another advanced degree in Computer Science with Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building ML/AI systems for search, ranking, or recommender system

• Knowledgeable about applied research for using LLMs as agents

• Fluent in building fine-tuned language models for solving domain-specific problems

• Expertise in