Sr. Applied AI Engineer
Zapier is hiring multiple Senior Applied AI Engineers to help us build the future of automation with AI at its core. If you care about shipping real products, solving hard problems with large language models, and creating tools that help others build faster—this is your kind of role.
We’re hiring across four different teams, each with their own flavor of AI work. You’ll work on things like shared libraries, evaluation systems, orchestration patterns, or user-facing features—depending on the team. What they all have in common: you’ll ship to production, own meaningful problems, and make an impact across the company.
Here’s what each team is working on:
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Data AI/ML: This team builds shared AI infrastructure used across Zapier. They own tools like our LLM proxy, evaluation systems, and the internal ai-toolkit that makes it easier for other teams to build AI features. You'll help improve reliability, speed, and observability across everything we do with LLMs. If you like building foundational systems that power lots of other products, this is your team!
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Developer Experience (DevEx): DevEx makes sure engineers at Zapier can build with speed and confidence. You’ll work on tooling, golden paths, and best practices—helping teams build and ship AI features faster. This includes things like scaffolding tools, deployment flows, and making AI observability work out of the box. If you’ve ever said “why is this so painful to build?” and then gone and fixed it, you’ll fit right in!
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Model Context Protocol (MCP): MCP is a new standard that helps AI assistants connect to tools and data. We’re building a full-featured implementation at Zapier, and you’ll help define how 8,000+ apps become usable by AI—securely and reliably. It’s early days, so there’s lots to shape: from protocol details to user-facing interactions. If you like open standards, API design, and making AI actually useful, this team’s for you!
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Agents: Zapier Agents is one of our most ambitious bets: an AI assistant that helps users get work done across thousands of apps. You’ll work on memory, reasoning, integrations, and the interface that helps users delegate tasks with natural language. We’re a fast-moving product team that’s still discovering what’s possible, and what’s needed. If you want to build AI that helps real people do real work, you’ll love this team!
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…
Requirements
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 customers.
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.
Benefits
Compensation
United States
Base Salary $206.6K – $309.8K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
Canada
Base Salary CA$206.6K – CA$309.8K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
UK
Base Salary £118.1K – £177.1K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
Spain
Base Salary €134.5K – €201.7K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
We believe all Zapiens should be rewarded competitively and equitably, using practices that are simple and transparent. This philosophy ensures we’re able to find, grow, and retain exceptional people from a broad range of backgrounds. Here’s how we define our compensation principles:
Competitive: Zapier pays well among the technology sector.
Equitable: Consistent pay practices; Pay for impact
Simple: Pay is well understood, and pay practices are built for scale.
Transparent: Zapiens know how pay works, including how their pay is determined.
The application process will continue on the employer's website.
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