Staff Engineer, Applied AI
Staff Engineer, Applied AI
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Job Description
About Zapier
Were humans who simply think computers should do more work.
At Zapier were not just making softwarewere building a platform to help millions of businesses globally scale with automation and AI. Our mission is to make automation work for everyone by delivering products that delight our customers. Youll 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)
Zapier is hiring a Staff Applied AI Engineer for our Agents team to make agentic automation actually useful at scale. Youll shape how our Agents plan reason remember and safely take action through 8000 integrationswith enterprise-grade reliability. This isnt a labs playground. Agents is customer-facing and revenue-impacting. If you like shipping systems that thousands of teams rely onnot just demosyoull thrive here.
Agents @ Zapier: One of our most ambitious betsan AI assistant that helps users get work done across thousands of apps at your finger tips or as you sleep and all of it easy enough to build in the space between one meeting and the next. Youll work on reasoning integrations and the interface that lets users delegate with natural language. We move fast but we harden what we ship.
Why this is different (and exciting)
Actions are solved here: Everyones building agents; few can make them do things while you sleep. Zapiers native connection to 8000 apps gives your agent real superpowers on day one.
Immediate impact & distribution: Ship improvements that land in real customer environments quicklyacross SMB to enterprisethen iterate with telemetry not vibes.
Hard problems not hype: Planning & tool selection grounding & evals safety & governance memory models latency/cost tradeoffsat production scale.
Autonomy with responsibility: Your decisions shape product strategy not just implementation details.
Pragmatic AI culture: We explore new things as they develop and push the boundaries of agentic ability and UX but we know when to lock down standardize and scale. Reliability > novelty when customers depend on it.
If youre interested in advancing your career at a fast-growing profitable impact-driven company then read on
About You
Proven engineering impact: Youve driven outcomes in complex cloud-based systems used by real customers. Bonus: youve helped win or expand enterprise dealsleading 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 contributionpairing with product teams unblocking adoption modeling best practices and shipping. You execute not just advise.
Pragmatic judgment over novelty: You separate signal from hype. Youre 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 scaleusing 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 environmentswhere priorities are fluid and ambiguity is the norm.
Skilled communicator: Youre 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 dont just use AIyou advocate for it sharing your workflows and helping others level up.
Things Youll Do
Make Zapier Agents the #1 way to get real work done with AI: A year from now Agents is the obvious choiceand youve 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. Youll scout high-leverage opportunities define how planning and tool integrations show up in the user experience and set clear explore-vs-harden guardrailsincluding making the call when something isnt production-ready.
Drive technical oversight: Youll provide oversight for agent initiatives within and adjacent to Agents ensuring we scale responsibly (security privacy reliability) while keeping velocity high. Youll help Zapier adapt to a growing surface area without losing coherence.
Advance agent architecture & developer experience: Youll bring deep AI expertise to the Staff Engineer group collaborate with Principal Engineers on company-level direction.
Build data-driven systems: Youll design feedback loops and evaluation suites that capture real usage synthesize core use cases and improve grounding tool-use success prompting strategies and model choicebalancing quality latency and cost.
Integrate and innovate (pragmatically): Youll 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: Youll mentor engineers codify practical agent patterns and help teams and customers understand where Agents fits in their broader AI transformationmultiplying impact beyond your immediate team.
How to Apply
At Zapier we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us better which is why we have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity. Were looking for the best fit for each of our roles regardless of the type of companies in your background so we encourage you to apply even if your skills and experiences dont exactly match the job description. All we ask is that you answer a few in-depth questions in our application that would typically be asked at the start of an interview process. This helps speed things up by letting us get to know you and your skillset a bit better right out of the gate. Please be sure to answer each question; 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 are going to hear back from useven if we dont see an immediate fit with our fact throughout the process we strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application. We know well make mistakes from time to time so if you ever have questions about where you stand or about the process just ask your recruiter!
Zapier is an equal-opportunity employer and were excited to work with talented and empathetic people of all identities. Zapier does not discriminate based on someones identity in any aspect of hiring or employment as required by law and in line with our commitment to Diversity Inclusion Belonging and Equity. Our code of conduct provides a beacon for the kind of company we strive to be and we celebrate our differences because those differences are what allow us to make a product that serves a global user base. Zapier will consider all qualified applicants including those with criminal histories consistent with applicable laws.
Zapier prioritizes the security of our customers information and is dedicated to adhering to all applicable data privacy laws. You can review our privacy policy here.
Zapier is committed to inclusion. As part of this commitment Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodations are needed to participate in the job application or interview process please contact .
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Employment Type
Full-Time
