Staff Engineer, Applied AI

About Zapier Zapier is hiring a Staff Applied AI Engineer for our Agents team to make agentic automation useful at scale. You’ll shape how our Agents plan, reason, remember, and safely take action through 8,000+ integrations—with enterprise-grade reliability. This role is customer-facing and revenue-impacting. If you like shipping systems that thousands of teams rely on—not just demos—you’ll thrive here. Zapier is building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale 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: September 12, 2025 Location: Americas (North, Central and South America) About You Proven engineering impact: You’ve driven outcomes in complex, cloud-based systems used by real customers. Bonus: you’ve helped win or expand enterprise deals—leading POCs, navigating security/compliance reviews, or shaping product requirements to land enterprise adoption. Many strong candidates for our Staff+ role have 10+ years’ experience. We hire for impact and capability, not years. LLM expertise: You have at least 2 years or equivalent depth of hands-on work with large language models in production, including user-facing products leveraging agent architectures. You are familiar with transformer networks, attention mechanisms, and their role in generating responses, function calls, and other complex tasks. Evaluation & retrieval systems: You have direct experience deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs (performance, reliability, bias) and building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. You have nuanced perspectives and experience with indexing/chunking strategies, semantic search, and vector databases, and how they differ from traditional retrieval methods. Builder first: You lead through hands-on contribution—pairing with product teams, unblocking adoption, modeling best practices, and shipping. You execute, not just advise. Pragmatic judgment over novelty: You separate signal from hype. You’re comfortable saying “not ready for production” (and explaining why), and you partner with product to decide when to keep exploring vs. when to lock down, standardize, and scale—using results from evals, user impact, and clear cost/latency tradeoffs. You design for scale and ambiguity: You can design systems and solutions in complex, high-scale environments—where priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm. Skilled communicator: You’re known for moving fluidly between pair programming, cross-functional problem-solving, and customer discovery. You evaluate long vs. short-term solutions through the lens of speed to impact and cohesion of customer experience. You form trusting relationships and know how to bring others with you. You are an AI power user: You proactively embrace AI as a core part of your engineering toolkit and are excited to explore new ways it can accelerate learning, development, and operations. You don’t just use AI—you advocate for it, sharing your workflows and helping others level up. Things You’ll Do Make Zapier Agents the #1 way to get real work done with AI: A year from now, Agents is the obvious choice—and you’ve delivered features, spotted differentiation opportunities, advised on product strategy, and up-leveled how our teams and customers build with Agents. Shape AI & Agents strategy: Stay close to the AI ecosystem, filter hype, and bring the right insights in-house for targeted experiments with crisp success criteria. You’ll scout high-leverage opportunities, define how planning and tool integrations show up in the user experience, and set clear explore-vs-harden guardrails—including making the call when something isn’t production-ready. Drive technical oversight: You’ll provide oversight for agent initiatives within and adjacent to Agents, ensuring we scale responsibly (security, privacy, reliability) while keeping velocity high. You’ll help Zapier adapt to a growing surface area without losing coherence. Advance agent architecture & developer experience: You’ll bring deep AI expertise to the Staff Engineer group, collaborate with Principal Engineers on company-level direction. Build data-driven systems: You’ll design feedback loops and evaluation suites that capture real usage, synthesize core use cases, and improve grounding, tool-use success, prompting strategies, and model choice—balancing quality, latency, and cost. Integrate and innovate (pragmatically): You’ll explore emerging agent capabilities and the ecosystem around them, then make crisp go/no-go calls and turn the right bets into durable product and platform wins. Collaborate and teach: You’ll mentor engineers, codify practical agent patterns, and help teams and customers understand where Agents fits in their broader AI transformation—multiplying impact beyond your immediate team. How to Apply Zapier has a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. We’re looking for the best fit for each role, 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. Please answer a few in-depth questions in our application. 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’ll hear back from us—even if we don’t see an immediate fit. We strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. If you have questions about the process, just ask your recruiter. Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and does not discriminate based on identity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be, and we celebrate our differences because they allow us to serve a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, consistent with applicable laws. You can review our privacy policy here. Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations on request via the careers team. #J-18808-Ljbffr Salary: USD 72000 - 108000 per year Experience: 5 years required