Senior Applied AI Engineer, Zapier

$202.5-255.7k

Salary applicable to US applicants only, for Canadian applicants the range is $202.500 – CA$255.700. Plus equity

Semantic
Zapier
Google Workspace
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US

More information about location

Zapier

Workflow automation service

Job no longer available

Zapier

Workflow automation service

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation

Job no longer available

$202.5-255.7k

Salary applicable to US applicants only, for Canadian applicants the range is $202.500 – CA$255.700. Plus equity

Semantic
Zapier
Google Workspace
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US

More information about location

1001+ employees

B2BEnterpriseInternal toolsProductivityAutomation

Company mission

Zapier's mission is to Make Automation Work for Everyone!

Role

Who you are

  • We’re looking for someone who not only has deep experience working with LLMs but also understands how to harness these tools to create new, valuable experiences
  • This role sits at the intersection of traditional skill sets, requiring both the expertise of ML research and the practical know-how of backend engineering, along with proficiency in the latest AI technologies
  • You have 7+ years of experience, with at least 5 of those years dedicated to building distributed, scalable 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 are 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 worked with large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks in production environments. You’re well-versed in advanced prompt techniques for LLM grounding, such as chain-of-thought, static few-shot examples, and dynamic few-shot examples. You also have experience fine-tuning LLMs to meet specific needs, focusing on training data optimization and bias mitigation
  • You are proficient in deploying evaluation frameworks for LLMs, with a focus on performance, reliability, and bias assessment
  • You have experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and understand how to optimize knowledge retrieval for improved model accuracy and speed. You have a solid understanding of 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 a proven track record of working through the full lifecycle of building, testing, deploying, and scaling LLM architectures
  • You are an expert at identifying and documenting trade-offs made during the development process
  • You have strong 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
  • 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

What the job involves

  • We're looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join Zapier’s AI Code Gen Team and help us move closer to our mission of making automation accessible to everyone
  • As a Senior AI Engineer on our team, you’ll play a crucial role in designing, developing, and maintaining AI-powered systems that solve real-world problems
  • You’ll be responsible for integrating AI models into existing software, troubleshooting, and ensuring these systems run smoothly
  • Communication is key—whether you’re collaborating with fellow engineers or explaining complex AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders, your ability to bridge that gap will be vital
  • You understand that AI-based applications thrive on data-driven feedback loops, which will be central to any system you develop. These loops will capture and instrument user data, synthesize core use cases, and implement/test strategies with LLMs to enhance performance
  • You will be responsible for integrating LLMs into software products at Zapier, setting up the necessary infrastructure to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability
  • You will explore new and divergent LLM systems that can create measurable improvements over our current implementations
  • You will design and implement prompting strategies for LLMs to help users create new automations, making the process more intuitive and efficient
  • You will design and develop comprehensive evaluation suites to assess model performance and reliability
  • You will monitor the performance and health of AI systems, proactively detecting and addressing issues such as system failures and performance degradation
  • Depending on your experience, you may implement LLM-assisted retrieval algorithms to provide accurate answers over large datasets
  • You will collaborate with Data and cross-functional teams to refine and deploy LLM-based features

Application process

  • 30 September 2024 at 05:00 BST

Our take

Even before remote working became the "in thing", freelancers, small business owners, and large organisations have found themselves needing more and more software platforms to serve their operations needs. As people used more software services, Zapier founders saw the need to connect the actions between these softwares and save everyone some time.

Zapier is the largest integration and automation tool for businesses. Since being founded, Zapier has grown its suite of automation offerings across almost every mainstream software service. The company is one of the most successful to come out of Y Combinator, and has also been one of the pioneers of remote working.

Zapier has so far, been able to capitalise heavily on its advantage as first entrants and has had very little actual competition. Software services aren't going anywhere anytime soon and organisations are only going to need more of them. This puts Zapier in a strong place growth-wise but also opens up room for bolder companies to get in on the action. Companies like Airtable and Integromat are already preying on more niche segments of Zapier's market share.

Freddie headshot

Freddie

Company Specialist

Insights

Top investors

Many candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

38% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (1 round)

Oct 2012

$1.3m

SEED

Total funding: $1.3m

Company benefits

  • Work from anywhere
  • Bonus program
  • Unlimited vacation policy
  • Great healthcare + dental + vision coverage*
  • Retirement plan with company match*
  • Stock options for every Zapien**
  • 2 annual company retreats to awesome places
  • 14 weeks paid leave for new parents
  • Home office setup stipend
  • Professional development allowance

Company values

  • Default to Action - At Zapier, we're building toward a future that does not yet exist. As a result, delivering something real today—and learning from it—is typically better than delivering something of questionably better quality next week. However: action is not an achievement unto itself. Instead, our actions should connect to clear priorities and outcomes, especially what's best for our mission and customers.
  • Default to Transparency - We're a growing, distributed team across more than a dozen time zones. We do our best work when we make projects, processes, and systems available to everyone who needs them—inclusive of our customers. Transparency promotes equity and inclusion within our team and customer base. So work in public. Have discussions in the open and document your work. Transparency does not mean consultation or consensus on all decisions. In fact, an important form of transparency is clarity on who is responsible for a decision and who will be consulted.
  • Grow Through Feedback - We set ambitious goals at Zapier. We want our customers, people, and company to grow. Achieving these goals requires us to regularly learn and improve. Thankfully, our success has more to do with how quickly we learn than how "perfect" we are in a given moment. Whether it's about how we work or the work itself, feedback enables growth. As such, feedback is one of Zapier's most essential practices. Even so, feedback can be hard to give and hard to receive. We make a point to become good at it anyway—it's just that important.
  • Empathy Over Ego - Our customers and teams are part of a global community. To serve them best, we need to understand them. Empathy promotes understanding, curiosity, and humility—qualities that help us connect with and serve our customers. Empathy has similar positive effects on collaboration and belonging within our team. On ego: we all have them, and it's important that we share our perspectives in pursuit of what's right. But sometimes ego can bias our thinking too strongly toward our own views. It's for this reason that we emphasize empathy over ego.
  • Build the Robot - No matter your role, you'll find yourself doing repetitive work. Zapier is all about finding ways to work better—whether through automation, simplification, or prioritization—so that we can spend more time doing what humans do best. Note that it's unhelpful to automate or simplify the wrong process or outcome. Manual, less efficient processes are often the right approach early on. We default to action and accept inefficiency when it helps confirm the problems we're solving, and to test solutions for those problems.

Additional info

  • As a fully remote company with 800+ team members across 40+ states, 38 countries, and 18+ timezones, we’ve adopted a culture of asynchronous work. This work style allows teams to collaborate effectively across locations, time zones, skills, and each individual’s energy levels, and empowers employees to work in a setting that fits their needs. In practice, we live on Slack, with most conversations in public channels. It mimics the open-office feel and allows everyone to search the chat logs if they need to find something that happened when they weren’t around

Founders

Wade Foster

(CEO & Co-Founder)

Prior to co-founding Zapier, wasEmail Marketing Manager with Veterans United Home Loans, and Customer Development Lead at The Idea Works.

Bryan Helmig

(CTO & Co-Founder)

Was previously Product Dev/Manager at Veterans United Home Loans.

Mike Knoop

(Co-Founder)

Was CPO and Head of Labs at Zapier before becoming President. Previously was a Graduate Research at the University of Missouri.


People progressing

Joined as Customer Champion, promoted to Senior Customer Champion after 1 year, then again to Team Lead. He is now a Manager for the Paid Support Team.

Diversity & Inclusion at Zapier

Maggie Roque headshot

Maggie Roque (Director of DIBE )

  • At Zapier, we believe in DIBE as DNA. This paradigm serves three purposes: It is an aspiration (what we want to see in the future), an action (a conscious effort to lean into our vision in our day-to-day work), and a principle (a guiding truth that we build better products and environments when we build for everyone). We've had candid conversations as a company about the experience of our teammates through the employee lifecycle—from the first impression we make as a company to our internal promotion process to our exit interview. We’ll continue to have those candid conversations and to invest in our efforts to improve

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