Job Overview for Staff Engineer, Applied AI at Zapier

• Role: Staff Applied AI Engineer, AI Capabilities team
• Location: NAMER, EMEA (Remote)
• Employment Type: Full time
• Department: Engineering
• Compensation:
• United States & Canada: Base Salary $274.8K – $412.2K, offers equity and bonus
• UK: Base Salary £157.2K – £235.8K, offers equity and bonus
• Ireland & Spain: Base Salary €162.6K – €244K, offers equity and bonus

About the Role

• Build the shared AI execution platform powering all AI products at Zapier (Agents, Chatbots, AI by Zapier, future orchestration experiences).
• Work on unifying runtimes, tooling, data models, and orchestration layers into a single scalable platform.
• Provide deep technical expertise in LLMs, orchestration, evaluation, runtime systems, and platform engineering.
• Shape unified architecture, guide tradeoffs, elevate engineering standards.
• Ensure platform scalability, safety, cost-efficiency, and ease of development.
• Impact user-facing products by building foundational AI infrastructure.

Why This Role is Exciting

• Opportunity to build the AI platform behind one of the world’s largest automation ecosystems.
• Work on making AI reliable, fast, safe, cost-efficient.
• Enable product teams to ship smarter features faster.
• Blend platform design, system architecture, and applied AI in high-leverage engineering work.

Candidate Profile

• Proven impact in complex cloud-based systems; bonus if experienced with enterprise deals.
• At least 2 years hands-on experience with large language models in production.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks for LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
• Hands-on builder who leads by contribution.
• Pragmatic judgment balancing innovation with production readiness.
• Ability to design scalable systems in ambiguous environments.
• Skilled communicator across teams and customers.
• Proactive AI power user advocating for AI tools.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architectural efforts for unified AI platform (orchestrator architecture, runtime components).
• Guide technical decisions on orchestration patterns, execution flows, safety, data models.
• Provide oversight consolidating multiple runtimes into a single orchestrator balancing reliability and speed.
• Partner with product teams across AI org to support migrations and define interfaces.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical standards within AI Capabilities.

Work Hours & Collaboration

• Global candidates accepted but must work standard Eastern Time (ET) hours at least three days per week for collaboration.

Application Deadline

• Open for approximately 30 days from posting or until filled.